Notable Quotables

I’ve always believed that there are funny people everywhere, but they’re just not comedians. In fact, some of my best comedic inspirations were not professional entertainers.

- Steve Martin

You think Yoda stops teaching, just because his student does not want to hear? A teacher Yoda is. Yoda teaches like drunkards drink, like killers kill.

- Yoda

You measure your people and you take action on those that don’t measure up.

- Jack Welch

Most fears of rejection rest on the desire for approval from other people. Don’t base your self-esteem on their opinions.

- Harvey Mackay

How about we agree upon what our common American values are, which is let’s make this a true land of opportunity.

- Laurene Powell Jobs

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

- Bill Gates

I’m not trying to follow a set of rules and stuff. I’m just living my life.

- Joel Olsteen

When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.

- Steve Martin

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

- Walt Disney

The big question is: When will the term structure of interest rates change? That’s the question to be worried about.

- Ray Dalio

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.

- Seth Godin

Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

- Ray Dalio

Stop doing things that waste time. Don’t replace time with your family or things that you need to do. I needed to put together two fantasy teams this weekend because that’s something I enjoy, but I did stop playing Nintendo Wii for hours on end.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

God can do in a split second what might otherwise take you many years.

- Joel Olsteen

I will study and prepare myself, and someday the opportunity will come.

- Abraham Lincoln

I can walk through a hotel lobby and watch people at the desk and see what they’re doing. People don’t look at me. They don’t even know I’m there.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.

- Warren Buffett

There’s pros and cons of a big church. Cons is I don’t get to know everybody, I don’t get to go to their ballgame, I don’t get to marry everybody, but the pros are you get all this community, 800 ushers come in to serve, getting there at 7 in the morning on their day off and coming in on Saturday to make all those wafers.

- Joel Olsteen

The sudden attacks on the United States of America brought about adverse effects on the global economy in the short term. However, Mainland China has until now been able to maintain its economic growth on a steady course.

- Lee Shau Kee

What this industry is about is back to the basics in the new Internet economy; and the basics are profitability, cash flow, productivity and market-share gains.

- John Chambers

We should remember the warning of the wise Grail knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: You must choose, but choose wisely, for as the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.Choose the highest-yield material and you can be an idiot and enjoy stunning success. Choose poorly and, as the Grail knight implied, you’re screwed no matter what. You’ll chase your own tail for years.

- Timothy Ferriss

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.

- Elon Musk

[Introducing himself to Sony co-founder Akio Morita] I have six of your TVs in my house.

- Phil Knight

Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.

- Bill Gates

Play like you’re ten points behind in the final quarter. I’ve always heard this defined as operational cadence – creating a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of doing business that drives the relentless pursuit of results. Whatever I’ve learned about creating a sense of urgency started when I worked for Howard Davis at Tracy Locke. He really knew how to push people. Everything had to be done yesterday. And I was one of the people who go pushed. Howard was a master of intimidation. Everyone knew if you didn’t give him what he wanted, he was going to find another way to get it, and if your weren’t part of the solution then you were part of the problem. The clients loved Howard because they knew he’d kill for them (and none of us wanted to be killed). It wasn’t always comfortable, but it taught me the value of constantly putting pressure on myself and the people who work for me. In corporate America, pressure is a way of life, so rather that resist it or merely accept it, you have to learn to use it as a personal motivator.

- David Novak

I’d be happy to provide advice if anybody asked me no matter who the President is.

- Michael Bloomberg

I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.

- Walt Disney

I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial… I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.

- Winston Churchill

A startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

- Peter Thiel

Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

- Dale Carnegie

Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

- Winston Churchill

Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today. Go another mile!

- Og Mandino

We believe that it is better to give one a rod to fish rather than just dole out fish to them.

- Henry Sy

I’m a physician. I’ve been blessed with ideas and resources to use technology to make the world a better place. That’s what I would like to leave behind.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

In those days he was wiser than he is now, he used to frequently take my advice.

- Winston Churchill

The saving of money is solely a matter of habit. It is literally true that man, through the Law of Habit, shapes his own personality. Through repetition, any act indulged in a few times becomes a habit, and the mind appears to be nothing more than a mass of motivating forces growing out of our daily habits. When once fixed in the mind a habit voluntarily impels one to action.

- Napoleon Hill

They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.

- Winston Churchill

If someone’s criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”

- Timothy Ferriss

Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.

- Donald Trump

I guess the worst moment I ever had in business was the fear that Southwest Airlines wouldn’t get off the ground.

- Herb Kelleher

Mr. Carnegie’s Master Mind group consisted of a staff of approximately 50 men, with whom he surrounded himself, for the definiteness purpose of manufacturing and marketing steel. He attributed his entire fortune to the POWER he accumulated through this Master Mind…Great POWER CAN BE ACCUMULATED THROUGH NO OTHER PRINCIPLE.

- Napoleon Hill

Execution begins with a vision and your people saying, I understand it. I’m excited about it. I can help make it happen.

- David Novak

The most expensive piece of real estate is the six inches between your right and left ear. It’s what you create in that area that determines your wealth. We are only really limited by our mind.

- Dr. Dolf de Roos

If we do not have time to do it right the first time when will we have time to come back and do it right again later?

- Lee Cockerell

Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love.

- Buddha

If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.

- Dave Ramsey

In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it’s disruptive and it’s a problem.

- Ray Dalio

Trump has been very influential in helping me expand by vision. Sometimes I talk to Donald two or three times a day, and he’s taught me many things. The best thing was a story he tells me about buying a building. When he built Trump Tower he also bought the rights to use the Tiffany name on the building. It was gonna be Tiffany Tower. He late father said, Yeah right. When you change your name to Tiffany, you call it Tiffany Tower. But for now, you call it Trump. Over a period of years whenever he was in trouble, his name and his promotion of himself as a brand are what saved him. I keep that lesson in mind. I remember how connecting Def Comedy Jam to Def Jam records helped both entities – associating HBO with an established hip-hop brand helped get the show on the air, while linking the label to a hot TV show helped the label survive a cold period.

- Russell Simmons

She said, ‘My family is OK, John, but we lost everything.

- John Chambers

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Cisco Systems Capital will be investing in companies working on networking technology.

- John Chambers

I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.

- Dale Carnegie

To remain a credible leader, I must always work first, hardest, and longest on changing myself. This is neither easy nor natural, but it is essential.

- John C. Maxwell

The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.

- Ben Horowitz

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

- Henry Ford

The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.

- Seth Godin

You have in the U.S. around two million new diagnoses of cancer a year, and 13 million survivors, so you have about 10,000 patients that require analysis every day. That’s about five petabytes that need to be transmitted and computed on a daily basis.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.

- Peter Thiel

I’m much more concerned about America than the Democratic Party.

- Howard Schultz

I believe the scripture says that being gay is a sin.

- Joel Olsteen

I’ve traveled around the world, and what’s so revealing is that, despite the differences in culture, politics, language, how people dress, there is a universal feeling that we all want the same thing. We deeply want to be respected and appreciated for our differences.

- Howard Schultz

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 18. I started a company with a bunch of buddies that got funded in my senior year, and that’s when I finished school. It was called Scour, a peer-to-peer service, file-sharing.

- Travis Kalanick

There’s a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There’s a lot of sex, you know, in art. There’s a lot of naked women and men, and there’s intrigue, there’s fakery. It’s a real microcosm of the larger world.

- Steve Martin

The most practical, beautiful, workable philosophy in the world won’t work if you won’t.

- Zig Ziglar

I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized. I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You’re playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It’s hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.

- Steve Martin

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

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want that on my business card.

- Bill Gates

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

- Bill Gates

all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.

- Timothy Ferriss

We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture.

- Phil Knight

David Novak CEO of YUM Brands (on crisis management)

- David Novak

If the United States wants access to Chinese, Indian or Vietnamese markets, we must get access to theirs. U.S. protectionism is very subtle but it is very much there.

- Azim Premji

We’re trying to identify the key influencers and make them distribution points.

- Jack Dorsey

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge….

- Thomas Edison

Drucker said: ‘If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?’ … Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.

- Jack Welch

You’ll never rise any higher than the way you see yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World.

- Bill Gates

Twitter was around communication and visualizing what was happening in the world in real-time. Square was allowing everyone to accept the form of payment people have in their pocket today, which is a credit card.

- Jack Dorsey

It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

- Peter Thiel

If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.

- Tony Robbins

The skill sets it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, a successful marketer, or a relevant celebrity is a different skill set than you needed ten years ago, even though that was the skill set that mattered for decades.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

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