Notable Quotables

Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten.

- Anonymous

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

I think a big test we all face in life on a regular basis is that discouragement test. Life’s not always fair, but I believe if you keep doing the right thing, God will get you to where you are.

- Joel Olsteen

I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.

- Howard Schultz

Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market. That starts with asking yourself: what will the world look like 10 and 20 years from now, and how will my business fit in?

- Peter Thiel

We have more than six and one-half times the level of wealth of our non-millionaire neighbors, but, in our neighborhood, these non-millionaires outnumber us better than three to one. Could it be that they have chosen to trade wealth for acquiring high-status material possessions?

- The Millionaire Next Door

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

- Bill Gates

I don’t think that ambition should not be in the dictionary of entrepreneurs. But our ambition should be realistic. You have to realise that you can’t do everything.

- Mukesh Ambani

Don’t marry too early in life. It’s better to work hard when young and establish a career first.

- Lee Shau Kee

I was not strong enough to defeat him. Like his master before him, be destroyed, he must.

- Yoda

Cherish your dreams as they are the children of your soul… –

- Napoleon Hill

We modeled our employee stock ownership plan after Sam’s, and it worked well for us.

- Bernie Marcus

There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

- Henry Ford

Changes that used to occur over quarters are literally occurring over months.

- John Chambers

And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.

- Peter Drucker

Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

- Thomas Edison

When state funding for Irvine public schools began to diminish some time ago, my Irvine Company colleagues helped me to provide private funding support for continuation of basic science, art and music programs that had been eliminated by lack of state funding.

- Donald Bren

There is a time to provide advice and offer an opinion, and there is a time not to. Don’t be too quick to offer unsolicited advice. It certainly will not endear you to people.

- Harvey Mackay

Going the extra mile is the action of rendering more and better service than that for which you are presently paid. When you go the extra mile, the Law of Compensation comes into play.

- Napoleon Hill

Working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you.

- Jack Welch

Even leaders with the best of intentions can have dumb ideas sometimes, and if you have good people around you, then hopefully they’ll stop you before you’ve done too much damage.

- David Novak

I’ve always believed that businesses should be good citizens…

- Phil Knight

The idea would be in my mind – and I know it sounds strange – is that the most important advances in medicine would be made not by new knowledge in molecular biology, because that’s exceeding what we can even use. It’ll be made by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, figuring out a way to get all that information together.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble…We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.

- Warren Buffett

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.

- Thomas Edison

Nearly every person who develops an idea works at it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.

- Thomas Edison

The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.

- Thomas Edison

In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. 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.

- Peter Thiel

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

- Elon Musk

Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It’s really a great invention and I wouldn’t under-estimate the value of that, but they’re not designed to take care of social needs.

- George Soros

Let me remind everyone in this room that we are not changing guidance.

- John Chambers

Building a better you is the first step to building a better America.

- Zig Ziglar

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

- Warren Buffett

Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

- Steve Jobs

For any Silicon Valley company, the most important thing is the company. And any great founders need to get out of the way of the company. We presented a spark with an idea.

- Jack Dorsey

I believe that uncertainty is really my spirit’s way of whispering, I’m in flux. I can’t decide for you. Something is off-balance here.

- Oprah Winfrey

Records are made to be broken. It is in man’s nature to continue to strive to do just that.

- Richard Branson

It’s amazing how people will give when you don’t ask. Many of them send money because they believe in the message.

- Joel Olsteen

Figure out what the impact areas are in your business.

- Chet Holmes

Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.

- Winston Churchill

I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

- Steve Martin

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

Many businesses forget that a crucial part of cash flow is managing your own bill paying. Make sure you pay your bills promptly. Ask for extended terms up front. After you have paid timely for two or three months, ask for additional extensions on your payable terms. A supplier will usually extend credit for 30 to 90 days to a good customer.

- Robert Kiyosaki

This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

- Peter Drucker

He listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.

- Ron Chernow

After putting economics aside, I found that there were two primary reasons why people quit: They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving. They weren’t learning anything: The company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills.

- Ben Horowitz

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

- Henry Kissinger

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

- Thomas Edison

Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.

- Clayton M. Christensen

Three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs. Most of the others are self-employed professionals, such as doctors and accountants.

- Thomas J Stanley

Too many companies think they want to do a video blog to sell merchandise, but if you turn your site into QVC, you lose. I have an audience that trusts me. It’s about building a global brand – not selling four more bottles of Pinot Grigio.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The spread of online information isn’t just good for charities. It’s also good for donors. You can go to a site like Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits on their financial health as well as the amount of information they share about their work.

- Bill Gates

The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.

- Phil Knight

If you’re going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons.

- Seth Godin

I have lots of sources of information about what’s going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.

- Steve Ballmer

Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only to set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done.

- P.T. Barnum

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

Gain alignment every step of the way. Again, no involvement means no committment. Skip a layer and you will ultimately pay the price.

- David Novak

Hire the best staff you can find develop them as much as you can, and hand off everything you possibly you can to them…The power of this can be seen in explosive growth.

- Napoleon Hill

What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.”

- James C. Collins

The most obvious clue was sartorial: cleantech executives were running around wearing suits and ties. This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings.

- Peter Thiel

People have no confidence that Washington, both sides of aisle, are coming together to try and do what’s right for the economy.

- Michael Bloomberg

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

- Steve Wozniak

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

- Reed Hastings

If the United States has to accept the U.N. resolutions, we have to generalize it across the board. We can’t just pick and choose where we impose and accept the U.N. resolution and don’t accept them. U.N. Resolution 242 is very clear and states very clearly that Israel has to go back to the borders of the pre-war of 1967.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Whether you’re talking about the core consumer or the person on the street, the principle is the same: you have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.

- Phil Knight

If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.

- Seth Godin

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it’s very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

- Bill Gates

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

- Peter Drucker

User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s undervalued and underinvested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.

- Evan Williams

If you are a parent, you have probably already realized that your children are always watching what you do. And just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees who are watching their bosses.

- John C. Maxwell

Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you’ll create credit… So you reach a certain point that that you can’t do that anymore… There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?

- Ray Dalio

Well, today the Grammys is much much better than the Oscars. I think the differences in the shows are that the Grammys are much wilder. The Oscars is much more people in the industry. And people dress wilder, I think, at the Grammys.

- Steve Martin

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

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

If geek means you’re willing to study things, and if you think science and engineering matter, I plead guilty. If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

- Bill Gates

This shows you are never too old to get surprised.

- Jack Welch

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Don’t waste your time trying to win people over that can never be won over.

- Joel Olsteen

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Everything important to us—the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment—is singular.

- Peter Thiel

For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.

- Peter Thiel

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

- Seth Godin

I influence anybody who is able to get through the chaos of my first impression.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

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