Notable Quotables

It will be disastrous when a leader or manager shows up with one attitude one day and treats people with a different attitude the next day.

- Zig Ziglar

If you’re a Wal-Mart of a Meijer you can draw the shoppers without using signs to advertise your specials, … But when you’re a little guy, you really depend on those signs.

- Michael Ward

In absorbing companies, Rockefeller was secretive and asked them to continue operating under their original names and not divulge their Standard Oil Ownership. They were instructed to retain their original stationary, keep secret accounts, and not allude on paper to their Cleveland connection.

- Ron Chernow

I think, for years, people have been pushed down by religion, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they’ve been shown a God that you can’t measure up to.

- Joel Olsteen

Modern society is based on a modern idea: get the work done by replaceable cogs, by individuals programmed to do what they’re told, follow instructions and work cheap. The attraction of this system is evident by how easily ordinary organizations replace ordinary employees, and how eagerly schools indoctrinate their students.

- Seth Godin

He had realized something while arcing in slow circles toward the earth—risks weren’t that scary once you took them. His.

- Timothy Ferriss

You are the only person on earth who can use your ability. It’s an awesome responsibility.

- Zig Ziglar

Even if you are predisposed to being overweight, you’re not predestined to be fat.

- Timothy Ferriss

The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.

- Steve Martin

We are in the process of creating a group that has a broader business mix, better quality income streams and a stronger balance sheet. In doing so, our risk profile is spread out and we can better explore the growth potential across our five core businesses – property, hotels, infrastructure, services and telecommunications.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend. Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.

- Timothy Ferriss

There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‘The government’s corrupt,’ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.

- Bill Gates

One reason to buy a watch (or a book) is because you want to possess it, show it off, give it to your grandchildren. Holding a book is a luxury, one for which you pay a premium.

- Seth Godin

If somebody can do something 80 percent as good as you think you would have done it yourself, then you’ve got to let it go.

- Sara Blakely

In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.

- Bill Gates

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

- Ben Horowitz

If you want to reach the top, don’t run over others. Likely, the only way you’ll reach the top is to be carried there by others.

- John C. Maxwell

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

- Bill Gates

The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.

- Ben Horowitz

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

- Winston Churchill

Very important people have told me that they prefer good listeners to good talkers, but the ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait.

- Dale Carnegie

People might not think that, but the Republicans have all of the cards. And this is the time to get rid of Obamacare. This is the time to make the great deal.

- Donald Trump

Getting things straight in your head is a major achievement because there’s so much clutter out there. You’ve got to push aside the static to really hear the music.

- Stephen Wynn

This country provides opportunities. If you don’t take advantage of them, it’s your own fault.

- Sam Huff

It’s not time,” “Take it easy,” “Wait and see,” “It’s someone else’s turn” – none of these stalls are appropriate for a leader in search of change. There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.

- Seth Godin

If I’m in my position at a company, I may not have the knowledge of the C.E.O., I may not know what’s possible, or I may not have the creativity, but if I can identify a problem, that’s a valuable thing.

- Ben Horowitz

Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.

- Peter Thiel

People are skeptical of many televangelists, and I’m sensitive to that.

- Joel Olsteen

It is clothes. It is parts. Therefore, you combine the parts differently to create your own unique expression.

- Tadashi Yanai

Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.

- Bill Gates

I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.

- Rupert Murdoch

‘I don’t know’ has become ‘I don’t know yet’.

- Bill Gates

The slowdown in futures orders clearly signals that revenue growth in the second half of fiscal 1998 will be below our previous expectations. This is largely a result of the slowdown in the Asia Pacific market, where we now anticipate more moderate revenue growth in fiscal 1998 after increasing 84 percent on a constant dollar basis in fiscal 1997.

- Phil Knight

I failed the LSAT. Basically, if I had not failed, I’d have been a lawyer and there would be no Spanx. I think failure is nothing more than life’s way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating.

- Sara Blakely

A definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.

- Peter Thiel

For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.

- Steve Wozniak

The U.S. is talking about keeping interest rates near zero.

- Lee Shau Kee

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

- Oscar Wilde

The dream in your heart may be bigger than the environment in which you find yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

When someone we love is having difficulty and is giving us a bad time, it’s better to explore the cause than to criticize the action.

- Zig Ziglar

In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.

- Peter Thiel

We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it.

- James C. Collins

Urm. Put a shield on my saber I must.

- Yoda

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.

- Winston Churchill

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

- Bill Gates

Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.

- Sara Blakely

If I hadn’t given my money away, I’d have had more than anyone else on the planet.

- Bill Gates

Though the external environment is still fraught with uncertainties, mainland China, which has been less affected by the global financial tsunami, is expected to keep growing from strength to strength despite fine tuning of its moderately loose monetary policy on concerns of overheating in the property sector and inflation risk.

- Lee Shau Kee

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

- Warren Buffett

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.

- Henry Ford

Over the years, Hong Kong has been confronted with various challenges. 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

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

- Elon Musk

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

- Jeff Bezos

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

- Winston Churchill

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

- Albert Einstein

God will never ask you for something without first depositing it within you. If you will dare to take a step of faith, you will discover gifts inside that you never before realized were there.

- Joel Olsteen

I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been

- Sam Walton

The Value of a Smile at Christmas It costs nothing, but creates much. It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever. None are so rich they can get along without it, and none so poor but are richer for its benefits. It creates happiness in the home, fosters good will in a business, and is the countersign of friends.

- Dale Carnegie

My job is to help more people have jobs.

- Jack Ma

Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.

- Zig Ziglar

Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.

- Jack Welch

I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.

- Bill Gates

The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.

- Seth Godin

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

- Winston Churchill

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

- Winston Churchill

With sustained recovery of the local economy, marked improvement in consumer spending and increasing tourist arrivals from Mainland China, these led to the expansion of certain local retail trades including cosmetics, audio-visual products and jewellery which in turn boosted the demand for retail shop spaces.

- Lee Shau Kee

Managers will play every game in the book to avoid identifying their bottom 10. Sometimes they’ll sneak in people who were planning to retire that year or others who already have been told to leave the organization.

- Jack Welch

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

- Bill Gates

I have ways of making money that you know nothing about…(if you’re firm won’t sell) you will stand alone, Your firm can never make any more money in Cleveland. No use trying to do business in competition with Standard Oil Company. If you do (continue to fight) it will end in your being wiped out.

- John D. Rockefeller

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.

- John C. Maxwell

I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I’ll come out of it refreshed and centered and that’s how I’ll feel and it’ll carry through the day.

- Ray Dalio

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

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting

- Thomas Jefferson

We, we – as I say, ,we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that indutjrises are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.

- Richard Branson

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution. It just needs clarity.

- Ben Horowitz

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

- Jeff Bezos

The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people – including my ex-wives.

- Ronald Perelman

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

- Winston Churchill

Inspiration can be found in a pile of junk. Sometimes, you can put it together with a good imagination and invent something.

- Thomas Edison

Unleash the power of people. No involvement means no committment.

- David Novak

Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.

- Peter Thiel

You’ve got to be before you can do and do before you can have.

- Zig Ziglar

Confidence is a habit that can be developed by acting as if you already had the confidence you desire to have.

- Brian Tracy

Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do. It’s why Nike is Nike, it’s why Apple is Apple, it’s why Walt Disney built Disney World and it’s why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I don’t know where we should take this company, but I do know that if I start with the right people, ask them the right questions, and engage them in vigorous debate, we will find a way to make this company great.

- James C. Collins

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

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