Notable Quotables

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

I’m not a businessman — I’m a business, man.

- Jay-Z

The Group launched the ‘Create a New World for Children’ Corporate Alliance Campaign with UNICEF in August 2003 to help and ease the plight of the underprivileged in our society. We both share the same commitment in creating a better environment for disadvantaged children and improving their education opportunities.

- Cheng Yu-tung

In a literal sense, even a private company, of course, cannot do everything that it wants without some discussion with government. As a good corporate citizen, Severstal discussed the idea of a merger with Arcelor with the Russian government.

- Alexei Mordashov

The reason I was able to grow my business was that every day, after producing 30 minutes of wine television, I spent 15 hours a day replying to every single person’s e-mail and every single person’s Twitter @ reply.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The first step is to establish that something is possible, then probability will occur.

- Elon Musk

Japan has only 100m people. Asia has 4bn. At least one-third, maybe nearly half, will become middle class, and this is a big opportunity for Japanese businessmen.

- Tadashi Yanai

The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting goals and achieving them. Even the most tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through each day convinced that every task, no matter how menial or boring, brings you closer to fulfilling your dreams.

- Og Mandino

No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit.

- Andrew Carnegie

Economic recovery in the United States has been taking place at a slow pace at a time of uncertainty in the Middle East. However, Mainland China was able to show steady sustained growth. Hong Kong, being right at the southern gateway of Mainland China, is able to benefit from its growth.

- Lee Shau Kee

The austerity policies for the mainland property market will remain intact in 2011.

- Lee Shau Kee

If you wake up deciding what you want to give versus what you’re going to get, you become a more successful person. In other words, if you want to make money, you have to help someone else make money.

- Russell Simmons

My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.

- Steve Wozniak

The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don’t have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.

- Ben Horowitz

So long as I can stay mentally alert – inquiring, curious – I want to keep going. I love my wife and my children, but I don’t want to sit around at home with them. We go on safaris and things like that. I can do that for a couple of weeks a year. I’m just not ready to stop, to die.

- Rupert Murdoch

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

- Jack Ma

Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.

- Michael Gerber

Madness is however an affliction which in war carries with it the advantage of SURPRISE.

- Winston Churchill

The pent-up demand for the good life in China is extraordinary.

- Stephen Wynn

I used to believe that a good product sold itself.

- Phil Knight

When you have one million dollars, you’re a lucky person. When you have 10 million dollars, you’ve got trouble, a lot of headaches. When you have more than one billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, that’s a responsibility you have – it’s the trust of people on you, because people believe you can spend money better than the others.

- Jack Ma

No matter how dark and gloomy it looks in your life right now, if you’ll release the weight of those burdens, you will see the sun break forth.

- Joel Olsteen

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.

- James C. Collins

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I’m addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.

- Larry Ellison

A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.

- John Shedd

As you and I march across the decades of time, we are going to meet a lot of unpleasant situations that are so. They cannot be otherwise. We have our choice. We can either accept them as inevitable and adjust ourselves to them, or we can ruin our lives with rebellion and maybe end up with a nervous breakdown.

- Dale Carnegie

The way to work with a bully is to take the ball and go home. First time, every time. When there’s no ball, there’s no game. Bullies hate that. So they’ll either behave so they can play with you or they’ll go bully someone else.

- Seth Godin

Getting things done in this country, if you want to build something, if you want to start a company, it’s getting to be virtually impossible with all of the bureaucracy and all of the approvals.

- Donald Trump

I like all kinds of music. I listen to Abigail Washburn, the Punch Brothers, and Marc Johnson, the great clawhammer player. I also listen a lot to Sirius Radio, there’s a lot of bluegrass there.

- Steve Martin

To enjoy peace, a nation must win the confidence and support of its people.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known

- Walt Disney

My principal business consists of giving commercial value to the brilliant, but misdirected, ideas of others…. Accordingly, I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.

- Thomas Edison

If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?

- Ben Horowitz

Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else.

- Peter Thiel

There’s this great quote…which says ‘The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.’

- Jack Dorsey

God knows your value; He sees your potential. You may not understand everything you are going through right now. But hold your head up high, knowing that God is in control and he has a great plan and purpose for your life. Your dreams may not have turned out exactly as you’d hoped, but the bible says that God’s ways are better and higher than our ways, even when everybody else rejects you, remember, God stands before you with His arms open wide. He always accepts you. He always confirms your value. God sees your two good moves! You are His prized possession. No matter what you go through in life, no matter how many disappointments you suffer, your value in God’s eyes always remains the same. You will always be the apple of His eye. He will never give up on you, so don’t give up on yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.

- Peter Thiel

Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it

- Aristotle

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

To be a superstar, you must do something exceptional. Not just survive the Dip, but use the Dip as an opportunity to create something so extraordinary that people can’t help but talk about it, recommend it, and, yes, choose it.

- Seth Godin

If something is expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

- Bill Gates

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

- Bill Gates

The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals.

- Timothy Ferriss

Being an Entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death

- Elon Musk

The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism.

- Peter Thiel

A Timid Trapeze Artist Is a Dead Trapeze Artist.

- Seth Godin

The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively – I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook – it sounds trivial, but people matter.

- Reid Hoffman

Our schools are not teaching students to think. It is astonishing how many young people have difficulty in putting their brains definitely and systematically to work….

- Thomas Edison

It’s okay. Let your ego push you to be the initiator. But tell your ego that the best way to get something shipped is to let other people take the credit. The real win for you (and your ego) is seeing something get shipped, not in getting the credit when it does.

- Seth Godin

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

- Steve Jobs

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they’ve never failed to imitate them.

- Zig Ziglar

The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you’ve ever been able to create before.

- Seth Godin

I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.

- Elon Musk

No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.

- Winston Churchill

You learn how to be book smart in school, but you better not forget that you also need to be street smart.

- Harvey Mackay

Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.

- James C. Collins

Advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away, it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later.

- Peter Thiel

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

Corporations that navigate through these rough times will prosper as the region inevitably enters a new era of prosperity.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Why should I clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I acquire.

- Henry Ford

Thinking back to old-time computer programming in the days before programming languages supported internationalization, we used to have to “internationalize” our code. We called this internationalization process “I18N” for short (localization was L10N), which meant I followed by eighteen letters followed by N.

- Ben Horowitz

Le Reve’ may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.

- Stephen Wynn

Out that expending emotional labor, working without a map, and driving in the dark involve confronting fear and living with the pain of vulnerability. The artist comes to a détente with these emotions and, instead of fighting with them, dances with them. The linchpin connects as a result of the indispensable nature of her contribution. The artist, on the other hand, connects because that’s what art is. The artist touches part of what it means to be truly human and does that work again and again.

- Seth Godin

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Success is about being where we are supposed to be and doing what we need to be doing.

- David Robinson

A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren’t dependent on Washington doing something different.

- Bill Gates

If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.

- Thomas Edison

Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.

- John C. Maxwell

I DECLARE that God has a great plan for my life. He is directing my steps. And even though I may not always understand how, I know my situation is not a surprise to God. He will work out every detail to my advantage. In His perfect timing, everything will turn out right. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

Most People have a desire to look for the exception instead of the desire to become exceptional.

- John C. Maxwell

For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.

- James C. Collins

I really chess-play culture shifts. I’m really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That’s what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.

- Bill Gates

She came up with what is now the Swoosh for $35 which is a pretty good bargain.

- Phil Knight

It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

- Peter Thiel

When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn’t allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in – if they could, they would do so.

- Bill Gates

After Scour, I started a company called Red Swoosh. The idea was to take those litigants who sued us for a huge amount of money and turn them into customers with the same technology. I wanted to get them to pay me. It was a revenge business.

- Travis Kalanick

Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gaining confidence, seeing how you react. If you’re in control. They’re in the control.

- Tom Landry

Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love.

- Buddha

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

- Winston Churchill

It’s God’s will for you to live in prosperity instead of poverty. It’s God’s will for you to pay your bills and not be in debt.

- Joel Olsteen

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

- Winston Churchill

Often, it is in trying times that the greatest endeavours are realised.

- Cheng Yu-tung

You must find something that you deeply love and are passionate about and are willing to sacrifice a lot to achieve.

- Howard Schultz

The length of this document defends it well against the risk of its being read.

- Winston Churchill

When Pat Holt strings together a list of words not to overuse—“Actually, totally, absolutely, completely, continually, constantly, continuously, literally, really, unfortunately, ironically, incredibly, hopefully, finally”—she’s not being a stickler for formality and grammar. Instead she’s reminding us that words matter, that poor word use is just a red flag for someone who wants to ignore you.

- Seth Godin

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

- Winston Churchill

My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.

- Dale Carnegie

I don’t want people in China to have deep pockets but shallow minds.

- Jack Ma

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