“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 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.

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

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.

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 was born on a full moon. Both my children were born on full moons, too. Some people say that’s scary. It is what it is, man, I don’t be trippin’. I couldn’t tell God when I wanted to be born.

The soul is healed by being with children.

When I was a child, if someone had talked to me about buying water, I would have thought it was a joke.

Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.

For a man’s counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger.

The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.