“When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.”

Helping people doesn’t have to be an unsound financial strategy.

You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can’t get her to come and get them then they won’t work.

It is still just unbelievable to us that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child deaths in the world.

Housework comes first, so girls often fall behind in school. Global statistics show that it’s increasingly girls, not boys, who don’t know how to read.

All lives have an equal value.

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.

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.

If you don’t have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won’t change the trajectory for students.

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.

I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.

When we invest in women, we invest in a powerful source of global development.

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.

No one can listen to your body for you. To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

Our growth is often determined by our willingness to let go.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

My politics are just inclined to be empathetic and humanistic. I grew up with so many different kinds of people with different politics, different religion, no religion, no politics, education, no education, and I was infatuated with all of them.

There’s always time to grow older. You can never grow younger.

It was astonishing that for some considerable distance around the mould growth the staphococcal colonies were undergoing lysis. What had formerly been a well-grown colony was now a faint shadow of its former self…I was sufficiently interested to pursue the subject.

Growing apart can also be a blessing. Make space for that.