“Women and girls should be able to determine their own future, no matter where they’re born.”

Women speaking up for themselves and for those around them is the strongest force we have to change the world.

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.

Now we just really need to do the work, which we’re doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.

We [with Bill Gates] started to make decisions about what we’d invest in. Then I actually started traveling for the foundation. I’ve probably been to India now eight times at least and Africa numerous times.

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 think the Americans need to understand that a lot of times the children are bored in school, and that is why they are not staying in.

I think it’s very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they’re growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.

Philanthropy is not about the money. It’s about using whatever resources you have at your fingertips and applying them to improving the world.

I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.

Women and girls face a whole host of issues. We start with health, so we work very deeply on maternal deaths, making sure that a mom doesn’t die in childbirth, making sure that she has access, for instance, to AIDS medication.

After a number of years dating, we decided we were good partners.

All women, everywhere, have the same hopes: we want to be self-sufficient and create better lives for ourselves and our loved ones.

I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.

Kids are falling through the cracks and nobody notices it. That to me is what’s wrong with the school system.

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.

You can’t save kids just with vaccines.

The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.

No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate, they know that this is the place that we were born and raised.

I didn’t grow up wealthy. We couldn’t even afford spaghetti sauce when I was first born, but my mom and dad worked really hard and came from the bottom up.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

I refuse to be ashamed of the fact that my body does bleed each month; it is why we are all here.

Nobody knows why they were born or where they come from.

Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.

For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.