Notable Quotables

I prefer the old theaters because the audience is… trapped.

- Jerry Seinfeld

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

- Jeff Bezos

The guerrilla is obsessed with benefits. Whenever offering a product or service, she focuses on how it will benefit the consumer and builds everything—the product, the delivery, the marketing—around that benefit.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.

- Sergey Brin

most people go through college and learn to read Virgil and master the mysteries of calculus without ever discovering how their own minds function.

- Dale Carnegie

Wanamaker learned this lesson early, but I personally had to blunder through this old world for a third of a century before it even began to dawn upon me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticise themselves for anything no matter how wrong it may be.

- Dale Carnegie

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

- Elon Musk

The word cellulite, for example, first appeared in the April 15, 1968, issue of Vogue magazine, and this invented disease soon had a believer base worldwide: Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles.… In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a problem” where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women’s natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma… . The number of diet- related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972.

- Timothy Ferriss

I’m not a tech guy. I’m looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people’s eyes.

- Jack Ma

You need to follow your own heart in light of God’s word and do what you feel is right and good for you.

- Joel Olsteen

You hope that one or both of them win a race right before our race. I know that in the past, when Bill Elliott won it always boosted sales here.

- Ed Clark

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. The old proverb is full of truth and meaning, “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” Many a man acquires a fortune by doing his business thoroughly, while his neighbor remains poor for life, because he only half does it. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business. Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself.

- P.T. Barnum

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

- Jerry Seinfeld

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

- John F. Kennedy

Since we happened to be good at shoes, we thought we could be successful with casual shoes. But we got our brains beat out.

- Phil Knight

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater their power to harm us.

- Voltaire

The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.

- Jeff Bezos

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

- Sergey Brin

I attract a crowd, not because I’m an extrovert or I’m over the top or I’m oozing with charisma. It’s because I care.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

If somebody’s going on your board, and you’re going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.

- Ben Horowitz

One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that good ones slip through.

- Seth Godin

The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself.

- Napoleon Hill

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

- Joel Olsteen

Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective – doing less – is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.

- Timothy Ferriss

In life and in business, you need to be good-hearted and trustworthy, and to have integrity. This is the way to build long-term relationships. It is also important to be optimistic and to look at challenges as opportunities.

- Henry Sy

Cultural industries will be the next engine for growth after real estate, and Wanda will make cultural industries our long-term focus.

- Wang Jianlin

I have worked at Nike and its predecessor company for 48 years. Some might call me a short timer.

- Phil Knight

Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.

- Ray Dalio

Stick with the Dips that are likely to pan out, and quit the Cul-de-Sacs to focus your resources.

- Seth Godin

Wild Turkey whiskey and Philip Morris cigarettes are essential to the maintenance of human life!

- Herb Kelleher

Anyone would fight for things that matter, true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter

- Peter Thiel

U.K. companies are in very international and very competitive markets. If you look at PC penetration in the U.K., it is very similar to the United States market.

- Bill Gates

Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.

- Reed Hastings

And we know that in ALL things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

- Romans 8:28

[In February 2011] We’ve not done a lot of marketing whatsoever. A lot of it has just been word of mouth.

- Jack Dorsey

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

- Bill Gates

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

- Thomas Edison

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

- Bill Gates

How you get up in the morning will play a big part in how high you go up in life.

- Zig Ziglar

I have 2 million Twitter followers. Some of those people are also yogis and activists and people who really go out and make a difference. I do as much as I can with my voice. It’s effortless in some cases. I try to remind everybody that they have that kind of voice.

- Russell Simmons

They didn’t use discussion as a sham process to let people have their say” so that they could buy in” to a predetermined decision. The process was more like a heated scientific debate, with people engaged in a search for the best answers.

- James C. Collins

Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.

- Jack Ma

God, I’m not going to look at what I don’t have. I’m looking unto you. I know in my weakness, you show up the strongest.

- Joel Olsteen

It almost goes without saying that the team needs diversity of skills. Can you imagine a hockey team of goalies? Or a football team of quarterbacks? It doesn’t make sense. In the same way, organizations require diverse talents to succeed, each player taking his part.

- John Maxwell

If you’ll dare to take your mind off your troubles, get your mind off your own needs and, instead, seek to be a blessing to other people, God will do more for you than you could even ask or think.

- Joel Olsteen

The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

- Timothy Ferriss

There is only one excuse for a speaker’s asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.

- Dale Carnegie

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

- Dave Barry

If you cannot save money, then the seeds of greatness are not in you.

- Brian Tracy

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 enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.

- Dale Carnegie

What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Connectors understand the necessity of creating value for others. If you want to be in the middle of the action, you must seek ways to enhance the lives of those surrounding you. The best connectors I know are extremely generous with introductions where they make sense. One of my favorite questions is, What are you most excited about right now? From that answer, I know who I can hook that person up with.

- Forbes

We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.

- Bill Gates

Named must your fear be before banish it you can.

- Yoda

I think my greatest moment in business was when the first Southwest airplane arrived after four years of litigation, and I walked up to it and I kissed that baby on the lips and I cried.

- Herb Kelleher

What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

- Elon Musk

Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they’ve discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.

- Seth Godin

Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.

- Bill Gates

When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Every person has a longing to be significant, to make a contribution, to be a part of something noble and purposeful.

- John C. Maxwell

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

We always try to look three to five years out in the decisions we make and there’s no question that the Cisco brand, our opportunity in the commercial market and the evolution of our leaders are going to take us to the next level.

- John Chambers

Nobody ever accused me of wisdom of any kind, let alone conventional.

- Phil Knight

Always render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be.

- Og Mandino

A few years ago there was a poll in china to name the greatest man ever. The winner was Mao, but there was a tie for second between [revolutionary hero] Zhou Enlai and Michael Jordan of the Chicago Red Oxen!

- Phil Knight

In line with the objective to diversify the business of your Group, Henderson Cyber was established to focus on businesses in the telecommunications and information technology fields.

- Lee Shau Kee

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. 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. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

- Ben Horowitz

And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.

- Winston Churchill

Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.

- Jack Welch

Think of the transformation as a process of buildup followed by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. Within each of these three stages, there are two key concepts, shown in the framework and described below. Wrapping around this entire framework is a concept we came to call the flywheel, which captures the gestalt of the entire process of going from good to great.

- James C. Collins

You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.

- Zig Ziglar

A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come on the same person.

- Zig Ziglar

One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace, good people don’t go into government.

- Donald Trump

To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.

- Joel Olsteen

People who are able to lift up others and boost the morale in organization are invaluable, and they are always a tremendous asset to a leader’s inner circle.

- Napoleon Hill

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

- Charles Darwin

That was so much fun. It’s been such a neat experience racing with these guys.

- Ed Clark

I am wired like a CEO and care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers even more than that. That’s always been my competitive advantage.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy, profit from folly rather than participate in it.

- Warren Buffett

A word of encouragement from a teacher to a child can change a life. A word of encouragement from a spouse can save a marriage. A word of encouragement from a leader can inspire a person to reach her potential.

- John C. Maxwell

My store, Wine Library, outsells big national chains. How do you think we do it? It started with hustle. I always say that our success wasn’t due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

There’s room for another planet between Mars and Jupiter. Given that planets formed everywhere else, why couldn’t another planet have formed there?

- John Chambers

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

- Jeff Bezos

For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

- Mark Zuckerberg

If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.

- Dale Carnegie

Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power.

- Sergey Brin

It is no ordindary desire that survives disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism, and the constant reminding of waste of time. It is a burning desire an obsession! – Napoleon Hill (on leadership)

- Napoleon Hill

In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.

- Elon Musk

Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a byproduct – a byproduct of achievement.

- Ray Kroc

My big focus is China and OPEC and all of these countries that are just absolutely destroying the United States.

- Donald Trump

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