Notable Quotables

Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable

- Peter Thiel

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

- George Foreman

I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about.

- Warren Buffett

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

- Joel Olsteen

If you look at coffee, tea, food and juice, we think there are inherent opportunities. If you look at health bars or grab-and-go products that are in our stores, we think we can significantly enhance them and make them more widely available.

- Howard Schultz

Although Hong Kong continued to be affected by the slowdown of the global economy in the past financial year, most of the retail shopping properties owned by the Group are located in new towns where continual growth of residents are maintained and consumer spending power are segregated, thereby providing a good support to stabilise rental of the retail shopping properties located in such new towns.

- Lee Shau Kee

If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.

- Zig Ziglar

Concentrate all of your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought into focus.

- Alexander Graham Bell

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

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, ‘What’s in it for me?

- Brian Tracy

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

- Winston Churchill

Opportunity does not knock, it presents itself when you beat down the door.

- Kyle Chandler

I love cities, and I love city governments in particular. But in politics it would have taken me 8 years from implementing a policy before I would get to see the feedback. With programming I could model the same policies and see the impact immediately. Technology is a far more efficient way to test.

- Jack Dorsey

Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.

- Napoleon Hill

Everyone deserves at least a chance to make things better. And besides people can surprise you.

- David Novak

Be helpful. When you see a person without a smile, give him one of yours.

- Zig Ziglar

Ridiculous yachts and private planes and big limousines wont make people enjoy life more, and it sends out terrible messages to the people who work for them. It would be so much better if that money was spent in Africa and its about getting a balance.

- Richard Branson

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

- Warren Buffett

By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.

- Lee Shau Kee

A word, a look, an accent, may affect the destiny not only of individuals, but of nations. He is a bold man who calls anything a trifle.

- Andrew Carnegie

Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten.

- Anonymous

The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)

- James C. Collins

Personally, I just hope they (the LA Lakers) suck forever.

- Mark Cuban

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

- Bill Gates

We have the brand, and we have the fulfillment capability. Now we had to get the Net, and that’s the easiest part of the game,

- Jack Welch

It’s absolutely true we set out to expose Microsoft’s covert activities, I feel very good about what we did … Maybe our investigation organization may have done things unsavory, but it’s not illegal. We got the truth out.

- Larry Ellison

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

- Bill Gates

He was contradicting everything he’d taught us about not running sick and making it worse. I knew it was just to make me acknowledge that his word was law, no matter how arbitrary. But that didn’t make it any easier to take. I was so mad I ran a personal record.

- Phil Knight

We are interested in others when they are interested in us.

- Dale Carnegie

If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

- Seth Godin

That’s an issue dear to my heart, because I was born in the Soviet Union during the communist era.

- Sergey Brin

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

- John D. Rockefeller

You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

- Dale Carnegie

I have plenty of money to do what I want to do, and I have the relationships.

- Timothy Ferriss

People don’t want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology – all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

- Peter Thiel

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

- Dale Carnegie

Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.

- Timothy Ferriss

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

- Napoleon Hill

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.

- Bill Gates

We are not in the business of iron ore. Whatever captive iron ore sources we have, we use it to make steel.

- Lakshmi Mittal

Will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer, instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.

- Peter Thiel

My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

- Elon Musk

Sales were limited by how many shoes we had, shoes were limited by how many dollars we had to order them.

- Phil Knight

I think people instinctively know that their job is to give service and that they are part of a community. It had a great impact on me when my father walked the picket lines and I walked with him during the civil rights movement.

- Russell Simmons

When commercializing disruptive technologies, they found or developed new markets that valued the attributes of the disruptive products, rather than search for a technological breakthrough so that the disruptive product could compete as a sustaining technology in mainstream markets.

- Clayton M. Christensen

We asked ourselves what we wanted this company to stand for. We didn’t want to just sell shoes. I wasn’t even into shoes – but I was pasionate about customer service.

- Tony Hsieh

The very important thing you should have is patience.

- Jack Ma

You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.

- Seth Godin

Today’s stock price is X, tommorrow’s is up to you.

- Sam Walton

I once dieted so religiously I quit eating in church.

- Zig Ziglar

I was the only westerner to succeed in a place that’s like a toilet, and you always come out of a toilet with a smell.

- David Reuben

I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there – a project a week.

- Seth Godin

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 want people to know their palate is a snowflake. We all like different things. Why should we all have the same taste in wines?

- Gary Vaynerchuk

If Wanda can control more than 20 per cent of the world’s three most important film markets – the United States, Europe and China – then it will have an empire with great voice in the industry.

- Wang Jianlin

If you look upon chronic diseases as an epidemic, and you see that the chronically ill are the poor, then you see that this issue of the uninsured is not really a moral but a financial obligation to change health care.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.

- Warren Buffett

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

The problems forced us to take a hard look at what we were doing, what was going wrong, what we were good at, and where we wanted to go.

- Phil Knight

The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves

- Ray Kroc

We all know far too many stories where the third generation just destroys everything that the first two have built up, and I certainly hope my family are different because I’ve worked too hard and my father has worked too hard for it to be given away.

- Gina Rinehart

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

- Winston Churchill

These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.

- Winston Churchill

There’s been so much corruption and so much cronyism in the taxi industry and so much regulatory capture, that if you ask for permission upfront for something that’s already legal, you’ll never get it.

- Travis Kalanick

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

- Henry Ford

Most competitors quit long before they’ve created something that makes it to the top.

- Seth Godin

So the challenge, as you contemplate your next opportunity to be boring or remarkable, is to answer these two questions: (1) “If I get criticized for this, will I suffer any measurable impact? Will I lose my job, get hit upside the head with a softball bat, or lose important friendships?” If the only side effect of the criticism is that you will feel bad about the criticism, then you have to compare that bad feeling with the benefits you’ll get from actually doing something worth doing. Being remarkable is exciting, fun, profitable, and great for your career. Feeling bad wears off. And then, once you’ve compared the bad feeling and the benefits, and you’ve sold yourself on taking the remarkable path, answer this one: (2) How can I create something that critics will criticize?

- Seth Godin

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

- Mark Zuckerberg

An economy is not a complicated thing, it just has a lot of moving parts.

- Ray Dalio

From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional.

- Peter Thiel

Art is a way to express yourself and through that you can escape a bad situation.

- Russell Simmons

People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.

- Dale Carnegie

Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you.

- Timothy Ferriss

I view my role more as trying to set up an environment where the personalitites, creativity and individuality of all the different employees come out and can shine.

- Tony Hsieh

One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life.

- Napoleon Hill

If you have a lot of [visionaries], you’ll have a lot of great ideas, something awesome that people will love; but you never get it done. It doesn’t ship. Nothing happens. If you have too many [execution oriented] people on your team, you’re executing like mad, things are getting built, and you’re shipping like crazy – but you’re building something that nobody wants. If you have a good balance of both in your company, you’re more likely to stay on track. Those people compliment each other.

- Caterina Fake

I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.

- Walt Disney

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

- Jeff Bezos

Residential properties that were sold by the Group summed up to around 5,800 units and amounted to approximately HK$12.8 billion.

- Lee Shau Kee

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

In creating an ideavirus, the advertiser creates an environment in which the idea can replicate and spread. It’s the virus that does the work, not the marketer.

- Seth Godin

When you set down the path to create art, whatever sort of art it is, understand that the path is neither short not easy. That means you must determine if the route is worth the effort. If it’s not, dream bigger.

- Seth Godin

Always remember that your present situation is not your final destination. The best is yet to come.

- Zig Ziglar

Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we’re afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.

- Seth Godin

Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless.

- James C. Collins

There is always plenty of capital for those who can create practical plans for using it.

- Napoleon Hill

As you stumble and learn, stumble and learn again, resolve to talk to yourself as if you were your best friend. So no What a #?%$@ idiot! when your BFF smashes an egg on the floor, m’kay? Be cool, like the Fonz.

- Timothy Ferriss

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription