Notable Quotables

The Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.

- Michael Gerber

It is hard to realize today that “government” during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln’s Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not “executives” and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.

- Peter Drucker

There’s plenty of room at the top but not enough room to sit down.

- Zig Ziglar

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

- Joel Olsteen

Expect the unexpected. And whenever possible, be the unexpected. I try to live by that on a daily basis.

- Jack Dorsey

A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.

- Harvey Mackay

We will be one of the most productive residential developers in China in the next few years.

- Lee Shau Kee

I enjoy the competition and the process of learning as we compete. The whole thing is just fascinating. I don’t know what I’ll do when I retire. When I go sailing, I look around … anyone want to race? I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.

- Larry Ellison

The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

- Peter Thiel

We can’t wait for Washington. Business leaders are going to have to galvanize their own constituencies and do everything they can to demonstrate confidence in the economy, and I think that can be contagious.

- Howard Schultz

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

- Winston Churchill

If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you—like a fever.

- Sam Walton

Well I think a lot of times we’re putting things off and I’m going to do it later. I’m going to break this bad habit or I’m going to pursue this dream or I’m going to treat my spouse better.

- Joel Olsteen

If you can’t make 40% on your money in Russia, you’re a fool.

- Simon Reuben

Every noteworthy achievement met with some sort of temporary setback before success came.

- Napoleon Hill

If you ask me whether the future is better than today, I would say yes; but the people must be ready to pay for services and pay their taxes.

- Aliko Dangote

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

- Anatole France

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 have a nice office. I have a nice house… So I’m not denying myself some great things. I just don’t happen to have expensive hobbies.

- Bill Gates

If you give a good thing to the world, then over time your karma will be good, and you’ll receive good.

- Russell Simmons

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

- Mark Twain

Value and purpose are about understanding the specific benefits you will help people receive if they receive what you have for them.

- Zig Ziglar

Connectivity enables transparency for better government, education, and health.

- Bill Gates

We have the necessary foundations that will enable us to weather the current storm and enter into a new era of growth.

- Cheng Yu-tung

So great leaders don’t try to please everyone. Great leaders don’t water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger. Instead, they realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group could ever be.

- Seth Godin

The alternative to tourism The linchpin, the engaged one, the graceful actor in an unfolding play—these people don’t seek to only inspect. They’re not traveling in order to tick a checkbox. Instead, they open themselves to the world they bought a ticket to, knowing full well that they will be changed.

- Seth Godin

Sometimes God will deliver you from the fire, and other times God will make you fireproof.

- Joel Olsteen

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

- Elon Musk

[On a small business class taught at university by Frank Shallenberger] Shallenberger started by defining the type of person who was an entrepreneur, and I realized he was talking to me.

- Phil Knight

Anyone who has held an iDevice or a smoothly machined MacBook has felt the result of Steve Jobs’s obsession with visual and experiential perfection. But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively.

- Peter Thiel

I absolutely don’t have $20 billion. But I’d love to, right?

- Jack Ma

Constantly probe the people who report to you, and encourage them to probe you.

- Ray Dalio

Opinions are the cheapest commodities on earth. Everyon has a flock of opinions ready to be wished upon anyone who will accept them. If you are influenced by opinions when you reach decisions you will not succeed in any undertaking, much less in that of transmuting YOUR OWN DESIRE into money…Close friends and relatives, while not meaning to do so, often handicap one through opinions and sometimes through ridicule, which is meant to be humorous. Thousands of men and women carry inferiority complexes with them all through life, because some well-meaning, but ignorant person destroyed their confidence through opinions or ridicule.

- Napoleon Hill

When you were made a leader you weren’t given a crown, you were given the responsibility to bring out the best in others.

- Jack Welch

Arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.

- Dale Carnegie

I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun.

- Reed Hastings

To be Jedi is to face the truth, and choose. Give off light, or darkness, Padawan. Be a candle, or the night.

- Yoda

People talk about consumer confidence, but that is a misleading phrase. There are a number of factors that mean people just have less money. Mortgage rates are at a historic high for many people. The fuel price is another major contributory factor. We don’t see any particular reason why any of that will change for at least another six months or so. We reckon we can grow market share, but that will be through increasing selling space.

- Simon Wolfson

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean, if a few drops of ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Getting every employee’s mind into the game is a huge part of what the CEO job is all about. Taking everyone’s best ideas and transferring them to others it the secret. Nothing is more important.

- Jack Welch

Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.

- Jack Welch

I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.

- Elon Musk

When your head of sales interviews for her next job, she won’t want to say that despite the fact that she ran a global sales force with hundreds of employees, her title was “Dude.”

- Ben Horowitz

You got to be rigorous in your appraisal system. The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.

- Jack Welch

Fatigue makes fools of us all. It robs you of your skills and your judgment, and it blinds you to creative solutions. It’s the best-conditioned athlete, not the most talented, who generally wins when the going gets tough.

- Harvey Mackay

It’s easier to add things on to a PC than it’s ever been before. It’s one click, and boom, it comes down.

- Bill Gates

Don’t solicit feedback on your product, your idea, or your business just for validation purposes. Be really careful about that. You want to tell the people that can help move your idea forward. But if you’re just looking to your friend, coworker, husband, wife, for validation, be careful. Because out of love… a lot of people will express some concerns, and it can stop a lot of multi-million dollar ideas right in their tracks.

- Sara Blakely

Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there.

- Timothy Ferriss

Always try to learn from other peoples mistakes, not your own – It is much cheaper that way!

- Donald Trump

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

- Winston Churchill

I have this old ’57 Porsche Speedster, and the way the door closes, I’ll just sit there and listen to the sound of the latch going, ‘cluh-CLICK-click.’ That door! I live for that door. Whatever the opposite of planned obsolescence is, that’s what I’m into.

- Jerry Seinfeld

First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.

- Professor Harry A. Overstreet

Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what’s coming.

- Steve Martin

I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort.

- Sergey Brin

We just want to have great people working for us.

- Sergey Brin

Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.

- Yoda

In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.

- Jorge Paulo Lemann

My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

- Elon Musk

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.

- Peter Drucker

And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.

- Reid Hoffman

The air of the English is down-to-earth. They care about details; there’s a tradition, but there’s also a counter-culture: the younger generation versus the older generation and so on. But then that’s well blended into a happy balance and crystallised into common sense.

- Tadashi Yanai

Being aware of your fear is smart. Overcoming it is the mark of a successful person.

- Seth Godin

My personal opinion is that I’m in the media too much. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.

- Viktor Vekselberg

On every occasion, we were able to rely on our unique qualities – resourcefulness, perseverance, diligence and passion for excellence – to rise above our difficulties.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Positive thinking is more than just a tagline. It changes the way we behave. And I firmly believe that when I am positive, it not only makes me better, but it also makes those around me better.

- Harvey Mackay

I think that any wealth creates a sense of trusteeship… it is characteristic of the new generation which has created wealth to have some amount of responsibility for it.

- Azim Premji

What kind of business world are we living in?

- Jack Ma

People who couldn’t fit into this informal and entreprenual environment left or were asked to leave. I cut my losses quickly on bad hires that didn’t perform.

- Jack Welch

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

- Randy Pausch

your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.

- Dale Carnegie

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

Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.

- Napoleon Hill

I’ve taken those pharmacists and asked them to reach out to doctors. Doctors still misprescribe very often. They leave gaps with care. People with asthma, they don’t take their inhalers, they wait until they’re sick, and by then, it’s too late. Now we’re already running up the bills and going to emergency rooms. We’re using our pharmacist to do the things they were educated to do, not to count pills. That’s not where the value is.

- George Paz

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets

- Steve Jobs

One who knows God is going to bless them, despite the fact that they have no idea how to actually raise capital or solve a real problem that people have in exchange for monetary compensation. They love the idea of business ownership, yet fear working, as though doing any actual work or rendering any tangible service or product might ruin their lives on this planet and for eternity.

- Clay Clark

We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

- Peter Thiel

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.

- Thomas Edison

This approach appeals to the media’s innate curiosity.Whereas a fastball stresses logic over emotion, the curveball stresses emotion over logic.

- Michael Levine

Blackjack is very scientific. There’s always a right answer and a wrong answer. Do you take a card, increase your bet, bet big or bet small. There’s absolutely a right and wrong answer.

- Charles Ergen

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful – it depends on how they’re managed.

- Ray Dalio

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.

- Bill Gates

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

- Winston Churchill

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