The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.
- Winston Churchill
Notable Quotables
Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Google’s done a super good job on search. Apple’s done a great job on the iPod.
- Bill Gates
Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.
- Timothy Ferriss
Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation…. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!
- Thomas Edison
Diplomacy is the art of saying Nice Doggie until you can find a rock.
- Will Rogers
Every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit
- Napoleon Hill
We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.
- Thomas Edison
You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.
- Timothy Ferriss
The future is in green energy, it’s in making steel for energy-efficient cars.
- Alexei Mordashov
I am thinking about launching a wine website where there is a deal and the crowd can dictate how cheap it can get.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I was uncomfortable with the timing, … We were getting millions less from the federal government for Medicaid and having to search for funds to restore some of those cuts and I just did not think it was right to put a pay raise on the board that would cost tens of millions of dollars.
- Michael Gerber
I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.
- Bill Gates
But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.
- Peter Thiel
I kicked but I also hugged.
- Jack Welch
Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.
- Henry Ford
Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today.
- Peter Thiel
Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.
- Harvey Mackay
Everything popular is wrong.
- Oscar Wilde
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
Esta es la clave: las únicas promesas que se avivarán en su vida y terminarán convirtiéndose en realidad son las promesas en las que usted se levanta y dice: Sí, eso es para mí”. Tiene que entrar en acuerdo con Dios y permitir que eso eche raíz.
- Joel Olsteen
It didn’t matter how bleak the situation or how stultifying their mediocrity, they all maintained unwavering faith that they would not just survive, but prevail as a great company. And yet, at the same time, they became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality.
- James C. Collins
The outside of a horse is good for the inside of man.
- Winston Churchill
But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it’s a lie and they’re protected if the person’s famous or it’s a company.
- Steve Wozniak
All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school – my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.
- Mark Zuckerberg
As a cure for worrying, work is far better than whiskey. I always found that, if I began to worry, the best thing I could do was focus upon doing something useful and then work very hard at it. Soon, I would forget what was troubling me.
- Thomas Edison
Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that’s really powerful.
- Reid Hoffman
The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.
- Timothy Ferriss
There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
- Bill Gates
At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn’t even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm.
- Ma Huateng
When enough people care about autism or diabetes or global warming, it helps everyone, even if only a tiny fraction actively participate.
- Seth Godin
Some of the biggest failures I’ve ever met, are people that have never failed.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Nothing good ever happens after 9:00 PM.
- Andy Pearson
A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.
- Winston Churchill
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
If you start today to do the right thing, you are already a success even if it doesn’t show yet.
- John C. Maxwell
I may be over the top on this, but I just don’t want to like my competitors. I want my people to believe that whenever he and our other competitors succeed, we will be less able to do all the things we want to do.
- Phil Knight
To me there is no picture so beautiful as smiling, bright-eyed, happy children; no music so sweet as their clear and ringing laughter.
- P.T. Barnum
Men like a ref decision because they just want to get back to the game.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.
- Bill Gates
I DECLARE breakthroughs are coming in my life, sudden bursts of God’s goodness. Not a trickle. Not a stream. But a flood of God’s power. A flood of healing. A flood of wisdom. A flood of favor. I am a breakthrough person and I choose to live breakthrough minded. I am expecting God to overwhelm me with His goodness and amaze me with His favor. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
- Peter Thiel
Similar to all of you, we would like to see higher growth.
- John Chambers
PR is gift-wrapping. If you package a bracelet in a Tiffany box, it will have a higher perceived value than if you presented it in a Kmart box.
- Michael Levine
Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.
- Sergey Brin
Save your first bucket of gold… then use it for investments.
- Lee Shau Kee
I’ve been to Disneyland, like, 10 times. I’m getting really tired of Disneyland.
- Elon Musk
We believe that within five years, 96 percent of British consumers will have access to the internet, whether it be through a personal computer, a set-top box or a mobile phone.
- Richard Branson
If he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.
- Peter Thiel
Speed is of the essence in responding to a crisis situation, and our focus is squarely on mobilizing resources to help in the relief and rebuilding efforts, while also helping customers and employees recover.
- John Chambers
We appreciate size, but only if it is robust growth. Just to be big is not a target.
- Alexei Mordashov
As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies. At my companies, our position is that we hire someone in spite of an MBA, not because of one.
- Elon Musk
The evolving social and digital media platforms and highly innovative and relevant payment capabilities are causing seismic changes in consumer behavior and creating equally disruptive opportunities for business.
- Howard Schultz
I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.
- Steve Martin
Customers today are strongly value oriented. But just what does that mean? Customers tell us that value means the results they receive in relation to the total costs (both the price and other costs to customers incurred in acquiring the service).
- Gary W. Lo
The danger of the Web is that you can go from idea to public announcement in under ten minutes.
- Seth Godin
I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
- Bill Cosby
Your story is a symphony, not a note.
- Seth Godin
Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end.
- Walt Disney
Humility is becoming a lost art, but it’s not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.
- Harvey Mackay
She said, ‘My family is OK, John, but we lost everything.
- John Chambers
[Retail] seemed more interesting than what I was doing.
- Michael Balmuth
It was definitely kind of surprising to see us come out and run the ball because we usually like to pass to start the game and put up some quick points. But tonight, we had real good balance offensively. We ran and passed the ball well, which kept them off balance all night.
- Jack Taylor
Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.
- Wang Jianlin
I don’t have all the answers.
- Joel Olsteen
Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map—these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.
- Seth Godin
This could easily end up one of the driest winters ever, unless things switch around.
- Ed Clark
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.
- Winston Churchill
Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.
- Bill Gates
I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.
- Steve Martin
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
The older I get, the better I understand that every day is a gift.
- Joel Olsteen
Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.
- Napoleon Hill
If you want to be enthusiastic, act enthusiastic.
- Dale Carnegie
The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.
- Elon Musk
The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.
- Bill Gates
For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.
- James C. Collins
Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
- Elon Musk
I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.
- Elon Musk
Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
- Winston Churchill
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
The productivity now at universities is terrible. Tenure is a terrible idea. It keeps them around forever and they don’t have to work hard.
- Jack Welch
I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.
- Sergey Brin
I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly.
- Steve Martin
I’m just always looking forwards. I spend very little time, looking backwards.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing.
- Phil Knight
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
- Confucius
If you’re brilliant and undiscovered and underappreciated (in whatever field you choose), then you’re being too generous about your definition of brilliant.
- Seth Godin
The bluegrass community… can be very strict. I didn’t know if I’d be welcomed into the bluegrass community or not, but I think they judge you very fairly… I felt really welcome.
- Steve Martin
President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy.
- Harold Hamm
Simplicity scales. Complexity does not.
- David Nilssen
It’s not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobiles one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.
- George Washington Carver
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
- George Eliot
The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way.
- Seth Godin
Last I looked – and I’m not a candidate – but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It’s most states are winners take all.
- Michael Bloomberg
The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.
- Napoleon Hill
The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.
- Reid Hoffman
I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.
- Mark Zuckerberg
You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.
- John C. Maxwell





