Top 100 Melinda Gates Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “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.”

— Melinda Gates

52. “It’s the mark of a backward society – or a society moving backward – when decisions are made for women by men.”

— Melinda Gates

53. “The Catholic Church tries to shut down the discussion of women priests by saying that Jesus chose men as his apostles at the Last Supper, and therefore only men are allowed to be priests. But we could as easily say that the Risen Christ appeared first to a woman and told her to go tell the men, and therefore only women are allowed to bring the Good News to the men.”

— Melinda Gates

54. “That is why we women have to lift each other up – not to replace men at the top of the hierarchy, but to become partners with men in ending hierarchy.”

— Melinda Gates

55. “Saving lives starts with bringing everyone in.”

— Melinda Gates

56. “Today in the US, we’re sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads – set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work...”

— Melinda Gates

57. “If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.”

— Melinda Gates

58. “It’s a delicate thing to initiate change in a traditional culture. It has to be done with the utmost care and respect. Transparency is crucial. Grievances must be heard. Failures must be acknowledged. Local people have to lead. Shared goals have to be emphasized. Messages have to appeal to people’s experience. The practice has to work clearly and quickly, and it’s important to emphasize the science.”

— Melinda Gates

59. “You are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.”

— Melinda Gates

60. “Birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda, and the victims of this paralysis are the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.”

— Melinda Gates

61. “We have to be careful in how we use this light shined on us.”

— Melinda Gates

62. “When these barriers are broken and opportunities open up, they not only lift women out of poverty; they can elevate women to equality with men in every culture and every level of society. No other single change can do more to improve the state of the world.”

— Melinda Gates

63. “When I am hurt, when I am in pain, when I am angry with someone for what they have done to me, I know the only way to end these feelings is to accept them.”

— Melinda Gates

64. “I want them to see that in the universal human desire to be happy, to develop our gifts, to contribute to others, to love and be loved – we’re all the same. Nobody is any better than anybody else, and no one’s happiness or human dignity matters more than anyone else’s.”

— Melinda Gates

65. “Poverty is created by barriers; we have to get around or break down those barriers to deliver solutions. But that’s not all. The more I saw our work in the field, the more I realized that delivery needs to shape strategy. The challenge of delivery reveals the causes of poverty. You learn why people are poor. You don’t have to guess what the barriers are. As soon as you try to deliver help, you run into them.”

— Melinda Gates

66. “To bring about a revolution of the heart, you have to let your heart break. Letting your heart break means sinking into the pain that’s underneath the anger... If you don’t accept the suffering, hurt can turn to hatred.”

— Melinda Gates

67. “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.”

— Melinda Gates

68. “If I ever see myself as separate or superior, if I try to lift myself up by pulling down others, if I believe people are on a journey I have completed, doing personal work I have mastered, attempting tasks I’ve accomplished – if I have any feeling that I am above them instead of trying to rise with them, then I have isolated myself from them.”

— Melinda Gates

69. “Wisdom isn’t about accumulating more facts; it’s about understanding big truths in a deeper way. Year by year, with the support and insights of friends and partners and people who have gone before me, I see more clearly that the primary causes of poverty and illness are the cultural, financial, and legal restrictions that block what women can do – and think they can do – for themselves and their children.”

— Melinda Gates

70. “It is especially galling that some of the people who want to cut funding for contraceptives cite morality. In my view, there is no morality without empathy, and there is certainly no empathy in this policy. Morality is loving your neighbor as yourself, which comes from seeing your neighbor as yourself, which means trying to ease your neighbor’s burdens – not add to them.”

— Melinda Gates

71. “We started our foundation because we believe we have a real opportunity to help advance equity around the world, to help make sure that, no matter where a person is born, he or she has the chance to live a healthy, productive life.”

— Melinda Gates

72. “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.”

— Melinda Gates

73. “Our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It’s what propels societies forward.”

— Melinda Gates

74. “Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity.”

— Melinda Gates

75. “In the developing world, it’s about time that women are on the agenda. For instance, 80 percent of small-subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and yet all the programs in the past were predominantly focused on men.”

— Melinda Gates

76. “What extreme poverty really means is that no matter how hard you work, you’re trapped. You can’t get out. Your efforts barely matter. You’ve been left behind by those who could life you up.”

— Melinda Gates

77. “I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.”

— Melinda Gates

78. “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.”

— Melinda Gates

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

— Melinda Gates

80. “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.”

— Melinda Gates

81. “Shaming women for their sexuality is a standard tactic for drowning out the voices of women who want to decide whether and when to have children.”

— Melinda Gates

82. “One of the defining features of hierarchy is that you take the powerful and exciting jobs for yourself and impose the crummy tasks on others. That’s a purpose of hierarchy. So when you come together to share the unpleasant work it’s an attack on hierarchy. Because what’s the point of hierarchy if not getting someone else to do what you don’t want to do? What is hierarchy but a way to escape your share of the responsibilities?”

— Melinda Gates

83. “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.”

— Melinda Gates

84. “I purposely didn’t go into these visits with fixed views; I tried to go with curiosity and a desire to learn.”

— Melinda Gates

85. “Don’t resist the feeling; accept the suffering.”

— Melinda Gates

86. “Gender bias does worldwide damage. It’s a cause of low productivity on farms. It’s a source of poverty and disease. It’s at the core of social customs that keep women down.”

— Melinda Gates

87. “What I realized much later, paradoxically, is that by trying to fit in, I was strengthening the culture that made me feel like I didn’t fit in.”

— Melinda Gates

88. “A 2010 academic study on group intelligence found that the collective intelligence of a workgroup is correlated to three factors: the average social sensitivity of the group members, the group’s ability to take turns contributing, and the proportion of females in the group.”

— Melinda Gates

89. “Opportunities have to be equal before you can know if abilities are equal. And opportunities for women have never been equal.”

— Melinda Gates

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

— Melinda Gates

91. “I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.”

— Melinda Gates

92. “When we better understand the realities of these women’s lives, we are able to design and deliver solutions that are more useful to them.”

— Melinda Gates

93. “In societies of deep poverty, women are pushed to the margins. Women are outsiders. That’s not a coincidence. When any community pushes any group out, especially its women, it’s creating a crisis that can only be reversed by bringing the outsiders back in. That is the core remedy for poverty and almost any social ill – including the excluded, going to the margins of society and bringing everybody back in.”

— Melinda Gates

94. “The rules that shape the lives of employees in the workplace today often don’t honor the lives of employees outside the workplace. That can make the workplace a hostile place – because it pits your work against your family in a contest one side has to lose.”

— Melinda Gates

95. “I’ve heard nauseating stories of women who have given up their dreams because they fear for their safety, who go to worse schools that are closer to home in order to avoid sexual predators. These stories come from all over the world, including the US. Until the day we end all gender-based violence, we need stronger efforts to protect women and girls. There is no equality without safety.”

— Melinda Gates

96. “I’m happy we have three healthy children and we’ll stay with three healthy children.”

— Melinda Gates

97. “Women around the world should have a tool that helps them plan their pregnancies.”

— Melinda Gates

98. “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.”

— Melinda Gates

99. “If you don’t accept the suffering, hurt can turn to hatred.”

— Melinda Gates

100. “And most of us fall into one of the same three groups: the people who try to create outsiders, the people who are made to feel like outsiders, and the people who stand by and don’t stop it.”

— Melinda Gates