231 Quotes by Melinda Gates

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.

The goal is for everyone to be connected. The goal is for everyone to belong. The goal is for everyone to be loved. Love is what lifts us up.

Make sure you continue to trust what you know now about yourself and stay true to what you believe in.

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

As women gain rights, families flourish, and so do societies. That connection is built on a simple truth: Whenever you include a group that’s been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you’re working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you’re working to benefit all members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone. Women’s rights and society’s health and wealth rise together.

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups – development, testing, marketing, user education.

That is the secret of an empowering education: A girl learns she is not who she’s been told she is. She is the equal of anyone, and she has rights she needs to assert and defend. This is how the great movements of social change get traction: when outsiders reject the low self-image society has imposed on them and begin to author a self-image of their own.

I felt suicidal. I couldn’t stop crying. I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be great if the car crashed and I died?

Poverty is not being able to protect your family. Poverty is not being able to save your children when mothers with more money could. And because the strongest instinct of a mother is to protect her children, poverty is the most disempowering force on earth.