Notable Quotables

Performance of the local property leasing market showed gradual improvement, particularly with demand rising substantially for the leasing of grade A as well as grad B office properties, and part of these properties registered an increase of over 50% as compared to the level as at the end of last year.

- Lee Shau Kee

Nike is not about going to a ball game. It’s a business.

- Phil Knight

Let’s make it easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.

- Jack Dorsey

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 person says No” and really means it, he or she is doing far more than saying a word of two letters. The entire organism—glandular, nervous, muscular—gathers itself together into a condition of rejection.

- Dale Carnegie

We got to know a lot of investors and know what they like and don’t like. Through many co-investments opportunities, we have built trust among these investors. So when it came to investing in Xiaomi, things were a lot easier.

- Lei Jun

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.

- Henry Ford

Maintain ‘baseball cards’ and/or ‘believability matrixes’ for your people. Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.

- Ray Dalio

greatness is first and foremost a matter of conscious choice and discipline.

- James C. Collins

I think there will be PCs at every price point.

- Bill Gates

The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls looking like hard work.

- Thomas Edison

I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.

- Og Mandino

The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’ … Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time.

- Mark Zuckerberg

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

The world is changing… I don’t, as a consumer, want advertising that’s not relevant. If we’re going to take a side, let’s take the side of the consumer.

- Charles Ergen

Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation and I will be ruthless.

- Warren Buffett

Every morning brings new potential, but if you dwell on the misfortunes of the day before, you tend to overlook tremendous opportunities.

- Harvey Mackay

Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.

- P.T. Barnum

We have a very wide range of content, but the brand-newest movies, what’s happening with those is a $30 pay-per-view option – not from Netflix but from DirecTV and others – of movies that are in the theater.

- Reed Hastings

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.

- Dale Carnegie

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.

- Bill Gates

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

- Peter Drucker

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

- Peter Drucker

The Western world loves liberalisation, provided it doesn’t affect them.

- Azim Premji

Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

- Bill Gates

Beverages have to be created. And they’re created by looking at what trend is in, say, the fashion industry – what color’s hot right now.

- Howard Schultz

The mistake that’s so easy to make is to get greedy as you choose your hive, to say, “this product is for everyone” or “anyone can benefit from this idea.” Well, there are seven billion people on the planet, so it’s unlikely your comment is correct; even if it is, there’s little chance that a virus would spread across a hive that big.

- Seth Godin

Nothing is as powerful as a changed mind,

- T.D Jakes

Eventually you won’t think of ‘the Internet business.’ You’ll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn’t clear.

- Bill Gates

I’m healthy as can be – not an ache or a pain. A lot of my prayer is thanking the Lord that I am healthy. I pray for long life and good health.

- Joel Olsteen

Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation, for your character is what you are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

- Dale Carnegie

If 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

It’s not what you’ve got. It’s what you use that makes a difference.

- Zig Ziglar

I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.

- Larry Page

The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realise in some subtle way that you realise their importance, and recognise it sincerely.

- Dale Carnegie

New World Group believes that the desire to change and surmount the status quo will be the key to advancement and progression.

- Cheng Yu-tung

When I cut the feet out of my pantyhose that one time, I saw it as my sign. I had been visualizing being self employed prior to this happening. It was my mental preparation meeting the opportunity in that moment.

- Sara Blakely

A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn’t dramatic.

- Ray Dalio

The goal is to get the buyer to like and trust you.

- Clay Clark

The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

Appreciation – Learn to give flowers while people are still living.

- Joel Olsteen

The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability… When the leader demonstrates vulnerability and sensibility and brings people together, the team wins.

- Howard Schultz

For more than a decade, I led an organization that put on an elaborate Christmas program each December. It was a big production, with over 250 people participating in more than 20 performances. By the end of the season, everyone who participated was exhausted.”

- John C. Maxwell

Cold steel and discipline and the slight capital surplus necessary to move and organise armies constituted the sole defences.

- Winston Churchill

Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.

- Peter Thiel

No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.

- Michael Bloomberg

What this industry is about is back to the basics in the new Internet economy; and the basics are profitability, cash flow, productivity and market-share gains.

- John Chambers

Steve Jobs’ ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.

- Bill Gates

Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It’s something you have to learn. It’s a very lonely job.

- Ben Horowitz

I’m a positive person, so I don’t get bogged down with it. If you’re expecting that, if you wall in that, if you practice that, then you’ll attract what you fear.

- Denzel Washington

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.

- Bill Gates

If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.

- Peter Thiel

There are two types of people in the world. One type is known as leaders and the other as followers. Decide at the outset whether you intend to become a leader in your chose calling or remain a follower. The difference in compensation is vast. The follwer cannot reasonably expect the compensation to which a leader is entitled, although many followers make the mistake of expecting such pay.

- Napoleon Hill

I’m honest enough to say I don’t know everything. You know, I don’t. I don’t understand all of God. I don’t understand, you know, some kind of why bad things happen.

- Joel Olsteen

Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

- Winston Churchill

Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.

- Jim Collins

Names are the sweetest, most important sound in any language.

- Dale Carnegie

As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies. At my companies, our position is that we hire someone in spite of an MBA, not because of one.

- Elon Musk

What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

- Peter Thiel

Well, you know, I was a human being before I became a businessman.

- George Soros

It is very important to grasp that Level 5 leadership is not just about humility and modesty. It is equally about ferocious resolve, an almost stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great.

- James C. Collins

The local property market witnessed a slowdown following the 9-11 incident in the United States, under an environment of high unemployment and sustained deflation in Hong Kong. On the whole, property prices showed a slight decline as compared with the price levels recorded in the previous financial year.

- Lee Shau Kee

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.

- Ben Horowitz

Artists, actors, people like that, they live in a very strange bubble of their own. They’re mollycoddled; they’re highly privileged.

- Stephen Wynn

If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary’s. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.

- Michael Bloomberg

If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you’ll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job.

- Seth Godin

The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.

- Larry Page

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‘Automobile Magazine.’ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.

- Jerry Seinfeld

For many of us, the happiest future is one that’s precisely like the past, except a little better.

- Seth Godin

I think it’d be crazy not to have the plan encompass the entire reservoir. If we have (the smaller map), we’ve got a bunch of other folks telling us what they want to see happen in our community.

- Jack Taylor

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

You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.

- Jack Ma

Organizations that achieve both market and operating focus are nearly unbeatable Customers don’t buy products or services. They buy results. They were designed to break what Schlesinger and his colleagues called the cycle of failure practiced by many of Au Bon Pain’s competitors who paid their employees and managers low wages, offered them little training and other support, and suffered high turnover of employees and limited customer loyalty as a result.

- James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser and Leonard

The 1990s have a good image. We tend to remember them as a prosperous, optimistic decade that happened to end with the internet boom and bust. But many of those years were not as cheerful as our nostalgia holds. We’ve long since forgotten the global context for the 18 months of dot-com mania at decade’s end.

- Peter Thiel

The Starbucks customer and the Teavana customer are two very different customers, two different need states that are highly complimentary.

- Howard Schultz

It’s almost always harder to raise capital than you thought it would be, and it always takes longer. So plan for that.

- Richard Harroch

Starbucks has changed the rules of engagement for the music industry.

- Howard Schultz

If someone’s criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”

- Timothy Ferriss

Back in high school, I really wanted to be a diesel mechanic. I was building pools and it was still working with my hands. I was installing the (reinforcement) bars, shaping the pools and then they’d bring the cement in. It was great. . . . Then I had my accident.

- Ed Clark

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

I say, don’t try to fight your own battles because God will do it.

- Joel Olsteen

Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw the stars.

- Dale Carnegie

Here lies the body of William Jay, Who died maintaining his right of way – He was right, dead right, as he sped along, But he’s just as dead as if he were wrong.

- Dale Carnegie

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

- Rupert Murdoch

About HBO’s “Silicon Valley”: It’s a Good Show.

- Peter Thiel

You can follow your favorite company or organization. You can also mix that in with your family and your social network and talk about all these interests in real time. That’s the value, not the brand ‘Twitter.’ Twitter just provides the venue for it.

- Jack Dorsey

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