I don't subscribe to the narrative that Africa is backward because of colonialism.

If we are to build grassroots respect for the institutions and processes that constitute democracy, the state must treat its citizens as real citizens rather than as subjects.

Rule of law is the most important element in any civil society.

What is a government supposed to do for its people? To improve the standard of living, to help them get jobs, get kids to schools, and have access to medicine and hospitals. Government may not directly provide these public goods and services, but government must be accountable for whether or not they are delivered to citizens.

I am not a politician. I am not in politics. I'm just a citizen.

I believe in having an impact in doing things.

It is possible to take a population of students who are failing and whose schools are failing them, who are being written off as not being college material, and if they have the right support, they can all go to college and succeed.

We have a responsibility to give people opportunities to do what they can do. It's a fundamental tenet of democratic society. Libertarians who believe in a completely minimalist state, and don't feel we have that responsibility, are harming humanity.

The kind of products you envision as an entrepreneur is a function of your life experience.

I routinely failed to understand that 'simple and straightforward' would have been a much better product strategy for Lotus.

Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.

Successful entrepreneurs develop products that inspire their passion. They have to. It's that passion that gets them through the long, arduous, uncertain and frightening early days of a start-up.

Often, the disconnect between the marketing hype around a new product and what the product actually does is astounding.

Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst.

When new technology in the classroom starts happening, some people get very excited and think of it as a panacea. It attracts very high amounts of money; it raises expectations, and those expectations aren't met.

You can't be in the tech community... without realizing there's a big shortage of talent.

People in the industry foresee a time in which, for many people, the only thing they'll need on a computer is a browser.

The widespread adoption of broadband and the continued advances in personal computing technology are finally making it possible for the collective creation of an online world on a realistic scale.

There's a great deal of suspicion and misunderstanding about IT among practicing doctors. One hears things like, 'I don't want to be turned into a data entry clerk, and I don't want some machine between me and my patients.'

Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time.

'Silicon Valley' has come to mean the Bay Area, not just down the Peninsula.

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information.

I woke up nights, worrying that Lotus was out of control - that no one would know what to do.