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"We're creating this alliance, GAVI, that has helped buy the vaccines that were in the rich world but not getting to the poor kids, getting a very cheap price and figuring out the cold chain, getting the delivery right, and then funding research for new vaccines. A lot of them are coming along. We've got a meningitis vaccine out, got that through large parts of Africa. That has been a huge success."
"Take agriculture, where we haven't done much, or sanitation; saying, "okay, we will be able to make a really huge effort there." It really energized the foundation and half of what we've gotten done in this last decade is because Warren [Buffett] trusted us."
"It was really phenomenal [Warren Buffett donation]. It grew out of the friendship that we had and the fact that his plan to have his wife run the foundation and give things away changed when she tragically died."
"Even for the diseases we don't focus on, cancer, heart disease, you're going to be way better off being sick 10 years from now than any time in the past."
"Even in some of our vaccine areas, like an AIDS vaccine, things have taken longer than we expected, but we have the pipeline of tools. The biological information that we have that gives us insights is fantastic."
"We got a malaria initiative, really a phenomenal time, even though in the early stages there was some uncertainty. Then of course [Barack] Obama, although he had budget constraints, he believed in these things; a lot of new initiatives, including in agriculture."
"The scientific understanding of some of these [childhood] diseases is advancing quite rapidly. There's some things like premature birth or nutrition, first day deaths that we need a lot more insights so that we can build the tools to solve those problems."
"[Africa] is the one continent where you still have a lot more young people than old people. So making sure they're healthy, good nutrition, good education. That'll be important for the world."
"President [George] Bush made the U.S. absolutely the leader, between its own PEPFAR, and it's been by far the biggest Global Fund donor. That's a legacy."
"Talking to mothers, always brings it home because they're so anxious to do everything they can for their kids and so tragic for them."
"You have the refugee crisis triggered by Syria. That's got a lot of costs associated with it. Domestically, budgets are incredibly tight because the economy's not generating the growth that makes for easy trade-offs."
"Part of the magic of economic growth is how you educate people, and the leading economies have to stay in front of that. From an economic point of view, it affects competitiveness and creates jobs. Or from a social justice point of view, you can take someone in the bottom tier of income and let him compete to be a doctor or lawyer. The education system is the only reason the dream of equal opportunity has a chance of being delivered - and we're not running a good education system."
"I have this very positive view of the world getting better and better. The list of things that could be huge setbacks is not very long: A nuclear war, climate change and epidemics."
"The market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the government to do the right things."
"With nuclear weapons, you'd think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won't stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number."
"We have two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan - again it's the instability that is a problem there. So over the next several years, we expect to drive the number of [polio] cases back down to zero because that is likely to be the second disease after smallpox that we completely eradicate."
"With polio, we've gone several years with no polio in all of Africa, but now with this we're having to go and mop up in that whole region, so it's a bit of a setback for polio. So in parallel we have to go back and get rid of those cases."
"People in business understand paying money to be more efficient. You can bootstrap markets where the devices are too expensive at first because these are so valuable to some people."
"There is this broad, broad recognition of how technology is enabling new things. Companies that never paid attention to computers in any form now see digital technology as creating threats and opportunities for them."
"Vaccines are extremely well tested; their safety is well understood. The false allegations about vaccines causing autism have been disproven. But there are still echoes out there confusing people."