Notable Quotables

Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.

- Zig Ziglar

When you supervise something, it is one thing. When you are in the middle of something, there is a different pace of life.

- Vladimir Potanin

An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.

- Seth Godin

An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.

- Jack Welch

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

- Dale Carnegie

What I mean is that none of my talents had a – what’s that great word – rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer – there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I’m a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do.

- Steve Martin

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.

- Winston Churchill

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

- Jeff Bezos

Around the survivors a perimeter create.

- Yoda

Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.

- Bill Gates

I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a might oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today.

- Og Mandino

Success occurs when opportunity meets preparation.

- Zig Ziglar

The right quote can inspire people to change their ways.

- Zig Ziglar

I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.

- George Soros

Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson.

- Winston Churchill

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

- Mark Twain

Historians will record 1998 as a time when the impossible happened in Asia

- Cheng Yu-tung

Everything important to us—the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment—is singular.

- Peter Thiel

I’m skeptical that the novel will be ‘re-invented.’

- Jeff Bezos

In the States, there’s ESPN3, and each country has different options, and other than premiere league football, there tends to be very little global content. And movie and TV rights are pretty broad content.

- Reed Hastings

The problem with pity parties is very few people come, and those who do don’t bring presents.

- Zig Ziglar

No matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.

- Sheryl Sandberg

Opportunity is often missed because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.

- Thomas Edison

Every job you take is a gamble that could increase your options or shut them down.

- Jack Welch

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

- Henry Ford

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

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

- Elon Musk

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

- Aristotle

May the Force be with you.

- Yoda

Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be. As is your faith in the dark side of the Force.

- Yoda

I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t won that AOL deal

- Sergey Brin

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade – and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.

- George Soros

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.

- Elon Musk

I’ve always believed that businesses should be good citizens…

- Phil Knight

Focus on something the customer wants, and then deliver it. “ 14. “Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity.

- Sam Walton

Great companies are built on great products.

- Elon Musk

So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.

- Peter Drucker

20% of what you do accounts for 80% of your results

- Brian Tracy

Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.

- Sam Walton

The successful business executive can handle challenges and solve problems at a remarkable clip.

- Zig Ziglar

Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

- Bill Gates

Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

If you wait until all the lights are green before you leave home, you’ll never get started on your trip to the top.

- Zig Ziglar

When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.

- Michael Otto

Education comes from within, you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

- Napoleon Hill

The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.

- Seth Godin

NO PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OR EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK PROCESS Your company now employs twenty-five people and you know that you should formalize the performance management process, but you don’t want to pay the price. You worry that doing so will make it feel like a “big company.” Moreover, you do not want your employees to be offended by the feedback, because you can’t afford to lose anyone right now. And people are happy, so why rock the boat? Why not take on a little management debt? The first noticeable payments will be due when somebody performs below expectations: CEO: “He was good when we hired him; what happened?” Manager: “He’s not doing the things that we need him to do.” CEO: “Did we clearly tell him that?” Manager: “Maybe not clearly . . .” However, the larger payment will be a silent tax. Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.

- Ben Horowitz

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.

- Arthur Golden

I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know anything about the speaker so there’s nothing that makes me want to get up early and go to it. I might catch it on TV.

- John Chambers

I know I could be the host of ‘SportsCenter’ in two years if I changed my show today to sports.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be.

- Steve Martin

Deadlines aren’t bad. They help you organize your time. They help you set priorities. They make you get going when you might not feel like it.

- Harvey Mackay

[On exporting sports shoes from Japan to the US]The best hope for exports lay with Onitsuka Company. So I made a cold call on them.

- Phil Knight

China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.

- Bill Gates

Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed, A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden of weeds.

- John D. Rockefeller

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

- Bill Gates

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

- Napoleon Hill

If you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. Write down your answers to these questions, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit – aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer.1. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.2. What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probably scenarios?4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?5. What are you putting off out of fear?6. What is it costing you – financially, emotionally, and physically – to postpone action?7. What are you waiting for?

- Timothy Ferriss

To do anything truly worth doing, I must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in with gusto and scramble through as well as I can.

- Og Mandino

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support – a significant problem in the software industry.

- Bill Gates

I loved the work – and that’s an important point: To succeed in retail, you have to love it. The process of bringing items in, displaying them attractively, and seeing them miraculously change into actual cash in the drawer has to gt your blood racing. You can triple the sale of an item just by how and where you display it.

- David Green

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.

- Elon Musk

I don’t think it’s a big deal to show opera glasses to someone searching for binoculars that you somehow infer is a woman. But you don’t want to pop up ads for H.I.V. drugs on someone’s page, because you inferred they have H.I.V., when their boss is standing there looking at their computer

- Sergey Brin

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes, but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.

- Larry Page

The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.

- Walt Disney

Too often we judge people based on our own backgrounds and experiences, but when you understand people’s stories, it’s easier to understand their demeanor.

- Joel Olsteen

Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it.

- Bill Gates

Let your motto then always be ‘Excelsior’, for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.

- P.T. Barnum

What’s important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn’t satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn’t right, or if the offerings aren’t right, it’s the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don’t get hung up on zeros.

- Jack Welch

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

- Peter Drucker

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

- Oprah Winfrey

If you look – look at – I mean, look at what’s going on with your gasoline prices. They’re going to go to $5, $6, $7 and we don’t have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, ‘Fellas, it’s time. It’s over. You’re not going to do it anymore.’

- Donald Trump

Woody’s Allen’s great line about relationships. A relationship is like a shark, it either has to move forward or it dies. And that’s true about your company.

- Larry Ellison

Men like a ref decision because they just want to get back to the game.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.

- Winston Churchill

You can’t build any kind of organization if you’re not going to surround yourself with people who have experience and skill base beyond your own.

- Howard Schultz

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

- Elon Musk

A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.

- John C. Maxwell

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.

- Jerry Seinfeld

True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

- Helen Keller

What material success does is provide you with the ability to concentrate on other things that really matter. And that is being able to make a difference, not only in your own life, but in other people’s lives.

- Oprah Winfrey

For the year ended 31 December 2011, the Group sold 325 residential units in Hong Kong, generating attributable sales revenue of HK$8,308 million, a marked increase when compared with HK$4,842 million for the previous financial year.

- Lee Shau Kee

If you have your health, if you have people in your life to love, you are blessed. Slow down and enjoy the simple things in life.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

- Thomas Jefferson

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