Quote collection
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"Bill [Gates] and I believe philanthropy can only be effective if it starts things and proves whether they actually work or not. That's the place that governments often don't want to, or can't, work."
"I've travelled extensively in the last 16 years - to slums in Bangladesh, to townships in South Africa, to all kinds of places in India, etc. When I would go and talk to villagers about something like vaccines, if I stayed long enough, the women would bring the conversation around and say: "What about this family planning tool? We can't keep having the number of children we're having.""
"The biggest pieces of work that we do are vaccines, because those save lives, and also family planning. Because if a woman can space the births of her children, it changes everything for her health and her child's health."
"Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don't get there by just pushing an outsider's point of view."
"Vaccines are a miracle cure. Eight out of 10 children are getting vaccines."
"Kids are falling through the cracks and nobody notices it. That to me is what's wrong with the school system."
"The biggest killers of children around the world are two things: diarrhea and pneumonia. When you think about it, in the United States, kids don't die of diarrhea anymore, but it's a huge problem in the developing world."
"Women are the centre of the family. It's the woman who decides what's eaten in the house, when to have the kids vaccinated; everything that has to do with the children's health revolves around her."
"All of a sudden people in the United States start to realize that vaccines make a difference. The controversy and the myth that's there, we're always trying to bust through that. So when I see a disease outbreak, I say to myself, "OK, that'll get people realizing how lucky we are to have vaccines.""
"Our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It’s what propels societies forward."
"After a number of years dating, we decided we were good partners."
"As a woman finds economic opportunity, even if she's only earning a couple of dollars a day, if she can save it on her phone, she then makes different decisions for her household than her husband might."
"Men make different investments than women do. Women tend to invest more of their earnings than men do in their family's well-being - as much as 10 times more."
"Now we just really need to do the work, which we're doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide."
"If you want to lift up an economy in Africa, you basically start with the women."
"If you can't travel to the developing world, look at helping to fund a woman with a small loan and follow her. Learn her story. Learn about the difference that you're making."
"When I studied computer science at Duke University in the first half of the 1980s, I had professors who treated women differently than men. I kind of got used to it. At Microsoft, I had to use my elbows and make sure I spoke up at the table, but it was an incredibly meritocratic place. Outside, in the industry, I would feel the sexism. I'd walk into a room and until I proved my worth, everyone would assume that the guy presenting with me had credibility and I didn't."
"I'm constantly saying to myself, 'I'm lucky I was born in the United States."
"We set out what's going to be our work time versus our foundation time versus family time, and we'll reassess that... sometimes every week."
"Even in decision-making, we work in self-help groups. That is women coming together in small groups of 10 to sometimes 15 women, where they start to get education about their rights, about clean water and sanitation, about how to have a healthy birth. You can bring in all kinds of education to them that way."