Notable Quotables

Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.

- Andrew Carnegie

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

- Thomas Edison

The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo, the job is to invent the status quo.

- Seth Godin

When we had seventy-five stores in Arkansas, seventy-five in Missouri, eighty in Oklahoma, whatever, people knew who we were, and everybody except the merchants who weren’t discounting looked forward to our coming to their town.

- Sam Walton

Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.

- Dale Carnegie

Six out of 10 Americans believe the American dream is dead according to a recent poll.

- CBSNews.com

My dad is like a cactus – introverted and tough. I’m a people person, like my mom, but I got my competitiveness from my dad. He came to this country from Belarus with nothing and built a real business. He’s my hero for giving me that need to run a business and for having enormous confidence in me.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gambled.

- Steve Martin

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

- Bill Gates

Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

When I hire someone, I try to get beneath the surface and go deep. The first question I ask is, Has this person demonstrated any leadership potential? I ask for specifics and probe carefully to find out exactly what that person contributed. After all, success has many fathers.’ I also look for enthusiasm, people who lean forward in their chairs, who get up on their haunches a little but when they talk about what they’ve done. I like to see the passion and the excitement because that’s what will allow someone to inspire others. The next thing I look for is an avid learners, someone who is curious, who has an ability to make connections, to pick up on trends, and to apply what’s going on in the rest of the world to his or her business career. You obviously need smart people with a proven track record, but the real stars are passionate about what they do and are avid learners. Those two things make people continually raise the bar on performance.

- David Novak

I know something about how to build constituencies in an independent way.

- Michael Bloomberg

Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.

- Ray Dalio

India is more of an aid recipient than a provider of aid.

- Bill Gates

It is very likely that Hong Kong has reached the end of the tunnel and the bright sunshine is not far from us.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I read the paper every day and the Bible every day, that way I know what both sides are up to.

- Zig Ziglar

Everyone needs to be valued. Everyone needs to be appreciated. Every person needs that blessing.

- Joel Olsteen

Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make

- Donald Trump

The invaders brought into Britain a principle common to all Germanic tribes, namely, the use of the money power to regulate all the legal relations of men. If there was any equality it was equality within each social grade. If there was liberty it was mainly liberty for the rich. If there were rights they were primarily the rights of property. There was no crime committed which could not be compounded by a money payment.

- Winston Churchill

For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate.

- Peter Thiel

Some people are so belligerent in their communication style that people just stop talking when they are in the room. If every time anyone brings up an issue with the marketing organization, the VP of marketing jumps down their throats, then guess what topic will never come up? This behavior can become so bad that nobody brings up any topic when the jerk is in the room. As a result, communication across the executive staff breaks down and the entire company slowly degenerates. Note that this only happens if the jerk in question is unquestionably brilliant. Otherwise, nobody will care when she attacks them. The bite only has impact if it comes from a big dog. If one of your big dogs destroys communication on your staff, you need to send her to the pound.

- Ben Horowitz

A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.

- John D. Rockefeller

Your legacy is being written by yourself. Make the right decisions.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

There are no rules here — we’re trying to accomplish something.

- Thomas Edison

1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality.2. A bad plan is better than no plan.3. Competitive markets destroy profits.4. Sales matters just as much as product.

- Peter Thiel

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

- Henry Ford

Instead of choosing to focus in the liability column, I chose to focus in the asset column.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.

- Peter Thiel

In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.

- Peter Thiel

Names are the sweetest, most important sound in any language.

- Dale Carnegie

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

- George Bernard Shaw

By the end of the war (the civil war) John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags, or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.

- Ron Chernow

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

- Joel Olsteen

The growth of the company and the license that Starbucks has is to participate in other food and beverage opportunities. We have a global business… and in many parts of the world, tea is much, much bigger than coffee, and we’re going to bring tea and bring our capability and our understanding of what we’ve done for coffee to tea.

- Howard Schultz

It is not enough that we do our best, sometimes we must do what is required.

- Winston Churchill

I’m just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.

- Ray Dalio

If standard of living is your major objective, quality of life almost never improves, but if quality of life is your number one objective, your standard of living almost always improves.

- Zig Ziglar

One of the main reasons that we lose our enthusiasm in life is because we become ungrateful..we let what was once a miracle become common to us. We get so accustomed to his goodness it becomes a routine..

- Joel Olsteen

People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.

- Bill Gates

Following a period of drastic market fluctuations in Asia during the summer months of the previous year, economies in the region gradually improved and stabilised during the financial year.

- Lee Shau Kee

Speed is of the essence in responding to a crisis situation, and our focus is squarely on mobilizing resources to help in the relief and rebuilding efforts, while also helping customers and employees recover.

- John Chambers

Your best days are not behind you. They’re in front of you.

- Joel Olsteen

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

- Oscar Wilde

Paper money will suffer. I’d be in mortar, not paper (money). We are in a time when paper investments are riskier than in the past. There is also a great amount of sovereign risk.

- Lee Shau Kee

A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun.

- Peter Thiel

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

- Samuel Beckett

Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.

- Ben Horowitz

Teaching Fire a LessonFire is hot. That’s what it does. If you get burned by fire, you can be annoyed at yourself, but being angry at fire doesn’t do you much good. And trying to teach the fire a lesson so it won’t be hot next time is certainly not time well spent.Our inclination is to give fire a pass, because it’s not human. But human beings are similar, in that they’re not going to change any time soon either.

- Seth Godin

I am concerned about any attrition in customer traffic at Starbucks, but I don’t want to use the economy, commodity prices or consumer confidence as an excuse. We must maintain a value proposition to our customers as well as differentiate the Starbucks Experience. That is the key.

- Howard Schultz

In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.

- Charles Dickens

I believe in that Old Chinese Proverb, When the student is willing, the teacher appears. But I would add, It also doesn’t hurt to be a little proactive about it.

- David Novak

There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. An effective way to enforce this requirement is by withholding new employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training program.

- Andrew Grove

Soon will I rest, yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have. Twilight is upon me, soon night must fall.

- Yoda

I try to make myself happy, no, because I know that if I’m not happy, my colleagues are not happy and my shareholders are not happy and my customers are not happy.

- Jack Ma

In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.

- Bill Gates

Wealth won’t give you satisfaction, creating a good product that’s well received by users is what matters most.

- Ma Huateng

Children astound me with their inquisitive minds. The world is wide and mysterious to them, and as they piece together the puzzle of life, they ask ‘Why?’ ceaselessly.

- John C. Maxwell

Don’t let any opportunity lead you away from serving God. That’s a price that’s too high to pay.

- George Foreman

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

- Steve Wozniak

In the next two to three years there will probably be only three to five players in this area. The chances to gain or lose market share are exciting.

- John Chambers

I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business, I have always been pretty driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where we’ve been. On the one hand, in the community, I really am an establishment kind of guy; on the other hand, in the marketplace, I have always been a maverick who enjoys shaking things up and creating a little anarchy. And sometimes the establishments made me mad…

- Sam Walton

I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage — leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.

- Warren Buffett

My ultimate dream is for the Irvine Ranch to be known and celebrated as much for the outstanding communities we’ve planned and built as it is for what is not developed. The beneficiary being the 50,000 acres of undeveloped land that is now permanently preserved and conserved as Open Space and parklands.

- Donald Bren

Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.

- Elon Musk

Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you’ll create credit… So you reach a certain point that that you can’t do that anymore… There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?

- Ray Dalio

Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.

- Steve Wozniak

[On the cost to found Nike] Six hundred dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars total investment.

- Phil Knight

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

- Walt Disney

Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

- Napoleon Hill

At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun ‘at work’ and getting paid for it!

- Zig Ziglar

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

- Winston Churchill

The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.

- Peter Drucker

For me, it’s a purity thing about the joke itself. It’s a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that’s a legitimate item you have there. For me, it’s nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It’s just not what I’m in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.

- Jerry Seinfeld

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

- Ben Horowitz

You learn how to be book smart in school, but you better not forget that you also need to be street smart.

- Harvey Mackay

Did you ever stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn’t have to work for a living? A hen has to lay eggs, a cow has to give milk, and a canary has to sing. But a dog makes his living by giving you nothing but love.

- Dale Carnegie

Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.

- John F. Kennedy

Encouragement is the fuel on which hope runs.

- Zig Ziglar

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

- Dale Carnegie

While a definitely optimistic future would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers.

- Peter Thiel

If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.

- Elon Musk

The great majority of people are “wandering generalities” rather than “meaningful specifics”. The fact is that you can’t bit a target that you can’t see. If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else. You have to have goals.

- Zig Ziglar

Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good

- Ron Chernow

Perhaps the most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.

- Ben Horowitz

When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.

- John C. Maxwell

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