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"This is not about trade, no one is a stronger supporter of capitalism and trade than I am. This is about sovereignty and whether a country has the right to set its own public health policies."
"All lives have equal value. And so you say, 'why do poor children die when other children don't? Why do some people have enough nutrition or reasonable toilets and other people don't?' So those basic needs that, through innovation, actually it's very affordable to bring them...to everyone."
"If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases."
"India is more of an aid recipient than a provider of aid."
"You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well."
"It's OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don't want them to catch up because we're slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse."
"...one of the most inventive forms of creative capitalism involves someone we all know very well. A few years ago, I was sitting in a bar here in Davos with Bono. Late at night, after a few drinks, he was on fire, talking about how we could get a percentage of each purchase from civic-minded companies to help change the world. He kept calling people, waking them up, and handing me the phone to show me the interest."
"American dependence on oil has only gone up as we've gone through various crises and not invested in R&D."
"Contrary to Piketty’s rentier hypothesis, I don’t see anyone on the [Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans] whose ancestors bought a great parcel of land in 1780 and have been accumulating family wealth by collecting rents ever since. In America, that old money is long gone - through instability, inflation, taxes, philanthropy, and spending."
"In the U.S., we believe the best way to improve lives is to improve public education."
"You’ve got to give great tools to small teams. Pick good people, use small teams and give them great tools so that they are very productive in terms of what they are doing."
"The only definition by which Americas best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis."
"Innovation is a good thing. The human condition - put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes - is improving because of innovation."
"I think (the internet) is contributing to Chinese political engagement..access to the outside world is preventing more censorship."
"For all these infectious diseases, the goal is to eventually get rid of them. And to do that we need to invent new tools, but nobody was doing that because there was no money to buy on behalf of the poorest, even the existing tools."
"We work with whoever is elected. Some will bring a more generous, open view of the world than others."
"When you have the medical advances you think will they be available to everyone. Will they not just be for the rich world or even just the rich people and the rich world? Will they be for the world at large?"
"Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to."
"I think there certainly was a milestone in the '90s with regards to the Internet achieving critical mass. There were several magical factors that came together: the creation of HTML by Tim Berners-Lee, the drop in the price of communications, and all the PCs out there that you could put this software into."
"The main thing that's missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics."