Notable Quotables

Complaints are your best learning opportunity

- Bill Gates

Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.

- P.T. Barnum

Sometimes when you take strong stands, if you’re not called to do it, you’re dividing the audience you’re trying to reach.

- Joel Olsteen

An educated man is not, necessarily, one who has an abundance of general or specialized knowledge. An educated man is one who has so developed the faculties of his mind that he may acquire anything he wants, or its equivalent, without violating the rights of others.

- Napoleon Hill

We’ve been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all, to prefer fitting in with the right people, the people with economic power. Now it’s your turn to stand up and stand out.

- Seth Godin

Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.

- Joel Olsteen

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

When you wake up every day, you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative; an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist. It’s all a matter of perspective.

- Harvey Mackay

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win — you’re still a rat.

- Lily Tomlin

You don’t make spending decisions, investment decisions, hiring decisions, or whether-you’re-going-to-look-for-a-job decisions when you don’t know what’s going to happen.

- Michael Bloomberg

The seed of a bamboo tree is planted, fertilized and watered. Nothing happens for the first year. There´s no sign of growth. Not even a hint. The same thing happens – or doesn´t happen – the second year. And then the third year. The tree is carefully watered and fertilized each year, but nothing shows. No growth. No anything. For eight years it can continue. Eight years! Then – after the eight years of fertilizing and watering have passed, with nothing to show for it – the bamboo tree suddently sprouts and grows thirty feet in three months!

- Zig Ziglar

We saw that a thousand results weren’t necessarily as useful as 10 good ones.

- Sergey Brin

This book, then, is a product of the last fifteen years, as well as a product of the fifteen years that preceded them. It was almost exactly eight years before The E-Myth was published that I founded our company, E-Myth Worldwide, which has provided the fuel and experience for the point of view I have shared with those of you who have read The E-Myth, and with those.

- Michael Gerber

China gets their oil from Libya. Why isn’t China involved? They’re going out spending billions of dollars a day on trying to take over the world economically. And we’re spending billions and billions and billions of dollars on policing the world. Why isn’t China involved with Libya? That – we don’t get oil from Libya, China does.

- Donald Trump

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked, leadership is defined by results not attributes.

- Peter Drucker

This Sunday School has been of help to me, greater perhaps than any other force in my Christian life, and I can ask no better things for you than that you, and all that shall come after you in this great band of workers for Christ, shall receive the same measure of blessedness which I have been permitted to have.

- John D. Rockefeller

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

- Bill Gates

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

- Warren Buffett

The 1990s have a good image. We tend to remember them as a prosperous, optimistic decade that happened to end with the internet boom and bust. But many of those years were not as cheerful as our nostalgia holds. We’ve long since forgotten the global context for the 18 months of dot-com mania at decade’s end.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t waste your time trying to win people over that can never be won over.

- Joel Olsteen

It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot . .

- Zig Ziglar

I am not a person who pursues luxury. I am not like those people who, once they have money, compulsively squander it or show it off.

- Wang Jianlin

The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

- Dale Carnegie

The one thing coaches cannot tolerate… is the individual who grows arrogant because he excelled at a lower level and believes he has nothing else to learn.

- Zig Ziglar

Building companies involves creating great wealth. If that means I am an oligarch, OK, it’s fine. But if being an oligarch is about buying football clubs, it is not for me.

- Alexei Mordashov

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

My financial service business is the absolute best thing I have done to empower the poor. I run many charities and fight many political causes, but my financial service company is the greatest gift I’ve given.

- Russell Simmons

In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins – not through strength, but through persistence.

- Buddha

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.

- Henry Ford

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

- Steve Martin

A girl child who is even a little bit educated is more conscious of family planning, health care and, in turn, her children’s own education.

- Azim Premji

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

- Bill Gates

You know, the diversity that America has is so special. It’s starting to really become a cool thing for young people.

- Russell Simmons

I’m concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise. My dad taught me that when you borrow money it’s the worst day of your life.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?

- Jack Welch

Pay attention to those employees who respectfully ask why. They are demonstrating an interest in their jobs and exhibiting a curiosity that could eventually translate into leadership ability.

- Harvey Mackay

There are only two kinds of employees that I’ve run across in 30 years. There are ones that get results, and ones that make excuses. If you’re in that second camp, you’re not going to like Dish.

- Charles Ergen

I always joke and say I want to invent a comfortable stiletto and then retire.

- Sara Blakely

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: —There spread a cloud of dust along a plainAnd underneath the cloud, or in it, ragedA furious battle, and men yelled, and swordsShocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s bannerWavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.A craven hung along the battle’s edge,And thought, Had I a sword of keener steel —That blue blade that the king’s son bears, — but thisBlunt thing! — he snapt and flung it from his hand,And lowering crept away and left the field.Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shoutLifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down,And saved a great cause that heroic day.

- Edward Rowland Sill

The idea would be in my mind – and I know it sounds strange – is that the most important advances in medicine would be made not by new knowledge in molecular biology, because that’s exceeding what we can even use. It’ll be made by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, figuring out a way to get all that information together.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

When you’ve got a strong enough why, you can always find the how.

- Zig Ziglar

Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.

- Peter Thiel

I learned about why startups should train their people when I worked at Netscape. People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense.

- Ben Horowitz

Excellence isn’t achieved without inspiration and perspiration. You’ve got to have both.

- George Foreman

The more seriously you take your growth, the more seriously your people will take you.

- John C. Maxwell

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel

Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.

- Ben Horowitz

I believe life is a series of near misses. A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see And pursuing that vision.

- Howard Schultz

One of the first things you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product. Similarly, a high quality human resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.

- Ben Horowitz

It’s not Pinterest where people are putting up pins. You’re changing the way cities work, and that’s fundamentally a third rail. We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an as—hole named Taxi.

- Travis Kalanick

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.

- Yoda

Surround yourself with people who want the best for you and the people you love!

- Zig Ziglar

Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.

- Steve Ballmer

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

I’m a little unusual: I’m a six-person-or-less extrovert.

- Reid Hoffman

When we recognize the fraud for what it is, we feel incredibly stupid. Something more than our bank accounts is damaged—our egos are damaged. As a result, it’s almost impossible for the marketer to regain our trust.

- Seth Godin

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

- Bill Gates

If people like you they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.

- Zig Ziglar

Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.

- Warren Buffett

You can start from where you are with what you’ve got and go to where it is you want to go.

- Zig Ziglar

The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.

- Peter Thiel

I’m from the country and I like it that way.

- Tracy Byrd

In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.

- Bill Gates

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.3. Improve on the competition 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.4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

- Peter Thiel

Obama has no solutions. Obama has failed the country and its great citizens, and they don’t like it when somebody such as myself speaks the truth about this – it hurts too much.

- Donald Trump

Men must be taught as if you taught them not And things unknown proposed as things forgot.

- Dale Carnegie

Only the Dark Lord of the Sith knows of our weakness. If informed the senate is, multiply our adversaries will.

- Yoda

Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

- Peter Thiel

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

- Napoleon Hill

When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.

- Bill Gates

Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of the human body.

- Peter Drucker

Hard times may have held you down, but they will not last forever. When all is said and done, you will be better off than before.

- Joel Olsteen

Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] … by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks … to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly.

- Winston Churchill

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

- Bill Gates

It’s a great thing when you can show that you’ve been successful and that you’ve made a lot of money and that you’ve employed a lot of people.

- Donald Trump

In any new business, someone has to have a vision. You are as good as the people around you. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Identify your core community and go from there. Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to. In my experience it often takes as long as five years to make a business work. Partners can fail you. Staff may not execute properly. You could be too far ahead of the market. SO you have to be willing to hand in there and make it happen. From the founding of Phat Farm in 1992 until 1997, I lost money. By my account, I experienced $10 million in losses. But today Phat Farm is visible, it is imitated and it generates hundreds of millions of dollars. It took time, but good ideas often do need time to take off. Being an entrepreneur requires instinct, fortitude and the ability to accept that the world does not run on your schedule. Sometimes you just have to believe.

- Russell Simmons

What you need to keep most in the U.S. is the entrepreneurial spirit.

- Alexei Mordashov

The truth is, somebody is always talking about you, so you have to let it go… if it’s not a part of your God-given destiny.

- Joel Olsteen

I’d work in the store all day, then take off around closing and drive that windy road over the Mississippi River, and then into Tennessee with an old homemade trailer I had hitched to my car. I’d stuff that car and trailer with whatever I could get good deals on – usually on soft lines, ladies panties and nylons, men’s shirts and I’d bring them back, price them low and just blow that stuff out of the store.

- Sam Walton

I want to fight poverty and ignorance and give opportunity to those people who are locked out

- Russell Simmons

[On signing up Michael Jordan in 1984 when he was just 21 years old] 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

I think the move by Mr. Greenspan was welcomed by everyone here.

- Jack Welch

Essentially, whoever is successful, whoever is going to do things that make a difference, is going to be talked about.

- Mukesh Ambani

It’s [the internet] like the flu – it just spreads like crazy.

- Jack Welch

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