Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.
- Sam Walton
Notable Quotables
There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.
- Peter Thiel
That’s the true spirit of Christmas, people being helped by people other than me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Look we gave this thing a good run. We both know it’s not working out. Let’s wrap this thing up.
- Jack Welch
It’s difficult for any single company to develop all the applications and services.
- Ma Huateng
Heroes always come from young people.
- Cheng Yu-tung
It’s a matter of invitations versus context. Twitter is really good at providing context, like, I’m having coffee at Third Rail Coffee.’ Foursquare is about invitations to places. In this respect Foursquare has started to replace Yelp for me.
- Jack Dorsey
In the end, I hope there’s a little note somewhere that says I designed a good computer.
- Steve Wozniak
If what others say doesn’t match what God has put in your heart, let it go in one ear and out the other.
- Joel Olsteen
The Buck Stops Here
- Harry Truman
My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.
- Jack Ma
Students of public speaking continually ask, How can I overcome self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an audience? Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a farmer’s wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as the train goes by? How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in a back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or automobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently see the machines? Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attain freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may give you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangle and be half scared to death. There are a great many wetless bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them. To plunge is the only way.
- Dale Carnegie
Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.
- Seth Godin
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.
- Warren Buffett
My strength is programming. I also think my biggest strength is simplification. That’s what I love doing.
- Jack Dorsey
My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she’s at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn’t think it would be fair; plus, they didn’t have any interest anyway.
- Howard Schultz
China remains a market with unprecedented potential.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Although prepared for martyrdom, I prefer that it be postponed.
- Winston Churchill
Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.
- Warren G. Tracy
Even though people are under economic pressure, they still want to support those brands with values that are compatible with their own.
- Howard Schultz
I once asked General Eisenhower’s son, John, if his father ever nourished resentments. No,” he replied, Dad never wastes a minute thinking about people he doesn’t like.
- Dale Carnegie
Regarding our links with the Russian government, Severstal is a private company with no government participation. We are answerable to our shareholders.
- Alexei Mordashov
We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.
- Dale Carnegie
Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.
- Bill Gates
EVERYBODY SELLS Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.
- Peter Thiel
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
- Bill Gates
I love technology, and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.
- Steve Martin
Let your motto then always be ‘Excelsior’, for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.
- P.T. Barnum
A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.
- Winston Churchill
The commonsense rules of the real world” are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.
- Timothy Ferriss
In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive.
- Bill Gates
If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.
- Elon Musk
The most interesting thing about a postage stamp is the persistence with which it sticks to its job.
- Napoleon Hill
The London property market has excellent investment opportunities.
- Wang Jianlin
The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
- Peter Thiel
Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
- Peter Drucker
It’s all a risk. Always. That’s not true, actually. The only exception: it’s a certainty that there’s risk. The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That’s because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing.
- Seth Godin
Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals. Management.
- Peter Drucker
A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.
- Timothy Ferriss
Uncontrolled Desire For Something For Nothing.
- Napoleon Hill
Discipline is hard–harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.
- Atul Gawande
For me, privacy and security are really important. We think about it in terms of both: You can’t have privacy without security.
- Larry Page
Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.
- Peter Thiel
Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature, Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon’s unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.
- Walt Disney
The best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.
- Peter Drucker
An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.
- Elon Musk
Today, we exaggerate the differences between left-liberal egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their common indefinite attitude.
- Peter Thiel
You want to do good things, and once you’ve done a couple of good things in a row, you think ‘Well gee, let’s not mess this up.’ But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.
- Bill Gates
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
- Winston Churchill
[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.
- Phil Knight
We found that for leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves.
- James C. Collins
Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you are ready or not to put this plan into action.
- Napoleon Hill
I would hope that , where possible, the newspaper will devote more thought to our commercial interests. In my view, there are sometimes news items that require a lot of caution. For instance, articles that talk about contracts being negotiated. There is some news that does more harm than good. The risk is that it threatens the commercial or industrial interests of our country.
- Serge Dassault
The successful leader must be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of his followers. If he tries to shift this responsibility he will not remain the leader. If one of his followers makes a mistake or proves to be incompetent, the leader must consider that it is he who failed.
- Napoleon Hill
If into the security recordings you go, only pain will you find.
- Yoda
My father had a series of blue-collar jobs and never made more than $20,000 a year. When I was seven, he got injured on a job. That was a very important point – because of the injury, he couldn’t walk, and the company he was working for did not pay him. There was no compensation. So there was no money and no food.
- Howard Schultz
By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.
- Ben Horowitz
My children – in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.
- Steve Ballmer
In the face of challenging economic and market conditions of the past 12 months, our diversified portfolio of multiple earnings streams has served us well.
- Cheng Yu-tung
When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.
- Peter Thiel
It’s pretty chilly by southern California standards.
- Ed Clark
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas, but the image is that they all come from the top. I’m afraid that’s not quite right.
- Bill Gates
Lack of Concentration Of Effort.
- Napoleon Hill
Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
- Peter Thiel
We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.
- Seth Godin
The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
- Ben Horowitz
I see this as my humanitarian legacy. We’re prepared to pay billions.
- Sheldon Adelson
Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve.
- Dale Carnegie
I am pleased with the strides we’ve made in our global equipment business where revenues grew 41 percent this past quarter and 37 percent year-to-date, … The strong dollar continues to negatively impact our European results constant dollar revenues in Europe were up 23 percent in the second quarter.
- Phil Knight
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
You are going to survive. And good things are going to start to happen again. And one day you are going to look back and this will not even be such a bad thing.
- Dale Carnegie
If my mother hadn’t been the most patient person in the world, I might never have gone to school.
- Ben Horowitz
So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work – what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?
- Ray Dalio
We’re trying to identify the key influencers and make them distribution points.
- Jack Dorsey
Desire is the ingredient that changes the hot water of mediocrity to the steam of outstanding success.
- Zig Ziglar
One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That’s why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
- Ben Horowitz
I always follow 4E’s wrapped in a ‘P’.
- Jack Welch
Psychological despotism, whether enlightened or not, is gross misuse of psychology. The main purpose of psychology is to acquire insight into, and mastery of, oneself. Not for nothing were what we now call the behavioral sciences originally called the moral sciences and “Know thyself” their main precept. To use psychology to control, dominate, and manipulate others is self-destructive abuse of knowledge. It is also a particularly repugnant form of tyranny.
- Peter Drucker
I don’t like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.
- Bill Gates
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
- Peter Drucker
I know how to make decisions and stand up to the criticism every day.
- Michael Bloomberg
People around the world, they want the authentic Starbucks experience.
- Howard Schultz
I once dieted so religiously I quit eating in church.
- Zig Ziglar
When we face with a steady eye the difficulties which lie before us, we may derive new confidence from remembering those we have already overcome.
- Winston Churchill
There are several styles of pitching, but all have two principles in common: they appeal personally to the individual being contacted, even if he or she is a stranger and they rely on logic to make a case.
- Michael Levine
If you don’t change the direction you are going, then you’re likely to end up where you’re heading…
- John C. Maxwell
There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.
- Winston Churchill
Government is dysfunctional.
- Michael Bloomberg
Wanda and Reliance are two of the largest private conglomerates in their respective countries. By joining our strengths together, we hope our cooperation will bring mutual benefits and great results.
- Wang Jianlin
One of my lifelong practices is to pay my obligations on time, especially my suppliers. Even in my early years as retailer, I didn’t delay my payments to suppliers, because I tell my kids that we have to be considerate to suppliers and think of their own hinyong or how they have to protect their sense of trustworthiness with others.
- Henry Sy
The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions… If people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.
- Winston Churchill
I read the paper every day and the Bible every day, that way I know what both sides are up to.
- Zig Ziglar
Stopped they must be; on this all depends. Only a fully-trained Jedi Knight, with the Force as his ally, will conquer Vader and his Emperor.
- Yoda
Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.
- Larry Ellison
I don’t know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.
- John C. Maxwell
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
