It’s important to remember that behind every data point is a daughter, a mother, a sister—a person with hopes and dreams.
MELINDA GATESHaving 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.
More Melinda Gates Quotes
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A woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman. But the search to find that voice can be remarkably difficult.
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After a number of years dating, we decided we were good partners.
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As a parent, the responsible thing to do – if you love your child – is to vaccinate your child.
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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.
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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.
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That’s universal – we all want to bring every good thing to our children. But what’s not universal is our ability to provide every good thing.
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Helping people doesn’t have to be an unsound financial strategy.
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Our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It’s what propels societies forward.
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We look in our own backyard and say, ‘How do we help at-risk families, at risk youth? How do we think through some of the problems affecting the Pacific Northwest and make some change there?’
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Deep human connection is … the purpose and the result of a meaningful life – and it will inspire the most amazing acts of love, generosity, and humanity.
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It is still just unbelievable to us that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child deaths in the world.
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What great changes have not been ambitious?
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Abortion has become a very politicised issue that I think countries have to work out themselves. In a lot of countries, people can’t even yet agree on what their laws should be.
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If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.
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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.
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If you don’t have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won’t change the trajectory for students.
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My undergraduate work was in computer science and economics. It just happened to be at that time when 34 percent of computer-science majors were women. We didn’t realize it was at the peak at the time.
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You can’t save kids just with vaccines.
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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.
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I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.
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The premise of this foundation is one life on this planet is no more valuable than the next.
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Everyone agrees that the failure of our high schools is tragic. It’s bad business, and it’s bad policy. But we act as if it can’t be helped. It can be helped. We designed these high schools; we can redesign them.
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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.
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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.
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Now, as smartphones are coming up, there are all kinds of apps that will start to be developed that will help women.
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Government funding that’s coming from the United States is making a huge difference on the ground in the developing world. It’s really palpable – it’s making a huge difference saving lives.
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