Notable Quotables

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.

- Evan Esar

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we’ve come up with doing that is through companies.

- Larry Page

I felt like Samson with a fresh haircut. But that dream of what the company could be sustained me.

- Ray Kroc

If you want people to know how much you care, show them how much you remember. Learn their names and use them often. It’s an important skill to develop.

- Harvey Mackay

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

- Colin Powell

The first four months of 2001 were extremely challenging, … This may be the fastest deceleration any company of our size has ever experienced.

- John Chambers

The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.

- Winston Churchill

If a job doesn’t excite you on some level—just because of the stuff of it—don’t settle.

- Jack Welch

People don’t believe what you tell them.They rarely believe what you show them.They often believe what their friends tell them.They always believe what they tell themselves.

- Seth Godin

The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing because you think you can only do a little.

- Zig Ziglar

Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.

- Steve Martin

If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

- Elon Musk

Chance made us sisters. Hearts made us friends.

- Zig Ziglar

It’s hard to make a living when you are in school…

- Michael Dell

Do not assume anything Obi-Wan. Clear your mind must be if you are to discover the real villains behind this plot.

- Yoda

This is like the Six Sigma approach to quality. Six Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units. The problem is that once you’re heading down this road, there’s no room left for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. Either you rolled ten strikes or you didn’t. Organizations that earn dramatic success always do it in markets where asymptotes don’t exist, or where they can be shattered. If you could figure out how to bowl 320, that would be amazing. Until that happens, pick a different sport if you want to be a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

I use the iPhone and iPad every day, and I no longer touch PCs at all.

- Masayoshi Son

The important thing about outsourcing or global sourcing is that it becomes a very powerful tool to leverage talent, improve productivity and reduce work cycles.

- Azim Premji

Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn’t really bother me.

- Jerry Seinfeld

People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.

- Zig Ziglar

It encourages you to focus on your work and the generosity that comes from interacting with (and helping) your community.

- Seth Godin

I’m not the judge. You know, God didn’t tell me to go around judging everybody.

- Joel Olsteen

The guerrilla is a cheapskate. She knows that every dollar allocated to marketing is essential, and she doesn’t plan to waste a penny. But she’s not foolish. When necessary, she hires the best designers, media planners, and experts in the business—she realizes that the best is often the cheapest in the end.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

- Peter Thiel

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

We’ve always had a pretty competitive and pretty ferocious battle with British Airways… It’s lasted now about 14 years, and we’re very pleased to have survived it.

- Richard Branson

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.

- Paul Theroux

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

- Jeff Bezos

You must unlearn what you have learned.

- Yoda

About one in five of us is retired. About two-thirds of us who are working are self-employed. Interestingly, self-employed peoplemake up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires.

- Thomas J Stanley

People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.

- Dale Carnegie

At the very beginning I actually felt a bit nervous. I didn’t have much experience in gaming.

- Lui Che Woo

Boadicea then turned upon Verulamium (St Albans). Here was another trading centre, to which high civic rank had been accorded. A like total slaughter and obliteration was inflicted. “No less”, according to Tacitus, “than seventy thousand citizens and allies were slain” in these three cities. “For the barbarians would have no capturing, no selling, nor any kind of traffic usual in war; they would have nothing but killing, by sword, cross, gibbet, or fire.” These grim words show us an inexpiable war like that waged between Carthage and her revolted mercenaries two centuries before. Some high modern authorities think these numbers are exaggerated; but there is no reason why London should not have contained thirty or forty thousand inhabitants, and Colchester and St Albans between them about an equal number. If the butcheries in the countryside are added the estimate of Tacitus may well stand. This is probably the most horrible episode which our Island has known. We see the crude and corrupt beginnings of a higher civilisation blotted out by the ferocious uprising of the native tribes. Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.

- Winston Churchill

Don’t sit around depressed and discouraged. Get a new vision for your life.

- Joel Olsteen

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

- Andrew Carnegie

In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.

- Peter Thiel

Our improvement and innovative ideas have never been hindered by our proven record, which instead has paved the way for determined, practical development and new directions.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.

- Seth Godin

Most of us have never felt at a disadvantage because we did not receive any inheritance. About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent.

- Thomas J Stanley

[In June 2011] We’re focused on building a product and a business. Going public is an instrument and tool to help sustain the company. In the future, there may be an IPO, but I don’t know what the timing is.

- Jack Dorsey

Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.

- Bill Gates

Some of the things I see around town are just disgusting.

- Jack Taylor

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

- Henry Ford

If you don’t know how it works, find out. If you’re not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn’t make sense, play with it until it does. If it’s not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out.

- Seth Godin

Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.

- Peter Drucker

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure.

- Colin Powell

We just tried to get our shoes on the feet of runners.

- Phil Knight

By combining broadband Internet, phone and video services over a single cable line, we are taking a major step towards implementing future integrated data, voice and video telecommunications on a mass market scale.

- John Chambers

You can succeed at almost anything for which you have unbridled enthusiasm.

- Zig Ziglar

You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, not by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it.

- Carlos Castaneda

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

As long as a person doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, he doesn’t grow.

- John Maxwell

Steve really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn’t there. He took over the project, and it was really my own opinion — only my opinion — that he wanted to compete with the Lisa group that had kicked him out.

- Steve Wozniak

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.

- Nolan Bushnell

I don’t use my brain about the creative thing. From a business standpoint, I instinctively do things: when I get something right, it’s never because I use my brain

- Russell Simmons

When interviewing candidates, it’s helpful to watch for small distinctions that indicate whether they view the world through the “me” prism or the “team” prism.

- Ben Horowitz

Keep in mind, hurting people often hurt other people as a result of their own pain. If somebody is rude and inconsiderate, you can almost be certain that they have some unresolved issues inside. They have some major problems, anger, resentment, or some heartache they are trying to cope with or overcome. The last thing they need is for you to make matters worse by responding angrily.

- Joel Olsteen

Did you eat half an Oreo cookie? No problem. If you’re a 220-pound male, you just need to climb 27 flights of stairs to burn it off.

- Timothy Ferriss

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

A definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.

- Peter Thiel

It’s difficult for any single company to develop all the applications and services.

- Ma Huateng

The top salesperson in the organization probably missed more sales than 90% of the sales people on the team, but they also made more calls than the others made.

- Zig Ziglar

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

- Jeff Bezos

Property prices depend mainly on the supply and demand of a particular point in time, in much the same way as the price for a commodity is fixed.

- Lee Shau Kee

I am not the smartest, but I surround myself with competent people.

- Henry Ford

Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.

- Larry Ellison

Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph: a beginning, a struggle and a victory.

- Mahatma Gandhi

There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?

- Ben Horowitz

I intentionally abandoned the hard stuff early on because not only do I think it’s useless, I think it’s a distraction.

- Seth Godin

I was only the servant of my country and had I, at any moment, failed to express her unflinching resolve to fight and conquer, I should at once have been rightly cast aside.

- Winston Churchill

As God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days.Why should you and I?

- Dr. Spencer Johnson

Starbucks has stores in America in many, many communities that are governed by many, many different municipalities. Starbucks cannot dictate to a municipality in Cincinnati or Kansas City or Sacramento how or why or when there should be a recycling program.

- Howard Schultz

Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.”

- Sam Walton

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

- Napoleon Hill

The U.S., especially Hollywood, is so strong for film production.

- Wang Jianlin

I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.

- Winston Churchill

I couldn’t figure out what to wear under my clothes. The body shapers were too thick at the time.

- Sara Blakely

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike”, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel

I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

- Steve Martin

People might not think that, but the Republicans have all of the cards. And this is the time to get rid of Obamacare. This is the time to make the great deal.

- Donald Trump

Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.

- John Wayne

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

- Warren Buffett

The Group is well positioned to meet the challenges ahead and will as ever continue to pursue higher growth.

- Cheng Yu-tung

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

- Jerry Seinfeld

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