Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time. 24 January 2004.

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning. 13 January 1997.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.

Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes. On his use of YouTube to watch videos.

If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act. At Live8, 2 July 2005.

Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' — that might be spam. 24 January 2004.

Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don't evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, 'how will it help us sell more copies of Windows?' April 30, 1998.

In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid. PBS interview with David Frost (November 1995).

There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.

Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority.

About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.

When we have the information highway, I'll put it out there. Everybody who wants to pay, I don't know, one cent, can see what movies I'm watching and what books I'm reading and certain other information. If I'm still interesting, I'll rack up dollars as people access that part of the highway. 1994.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.

To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination — and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard. At a conference on the Macintosh (1984).

I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating.

We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast... It will be some finite number of years, and I don't know the number — before our doom comes.

If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not? 1980.

It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit. 13 January 1997.

Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it — at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.