There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labour ofthinking-if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts thatbolster up what we already think-and ignore all the others! We want only the facts thatjustify our acts-the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justifyour preconceived prejudices!As Andre Maurois put it: Everything that is in agreement with our personal desiresseems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage.Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems?Wouldn’t we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, ifwe went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot ofpeople in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that twoplus two equals five-or maybe five hundred!
- Thomas Edison
Notable Quotables
To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.
- Winston Churchill
If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.
- Bill Gates
I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.
- Thomas Edison
I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.
- Henry Ford
It’s just not right that so many things don’t work when they should. I don’t think that will change for a long time.
- Steve Wozniak
Hip-hop is a voice for voiceless poor people.
- Russell Simmons
‘We are interested in others when they are interested in us.
- Publilius Syrus
Freely chosen, discipline is absolute freedom.
- James C. Collins
You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.
- Richard Branson
Ego stops you from getting things done and getting people to work with you. That’s why I firmly believe that ego and success are not compatible.
- Harvey Mackay
We’re pleased with the solid revenue and earnings per share results Cisco delivered during its second quarter, but also especially pleased with our strong order momentum. This proves our strategy is working in terms of the convergence of voice, video and data along with our balanced approach to our customer segments, core and advanced technologies, business and technology architecture and key geographic theaters.
- John Chambers
For every sale you miss because you were too enthusiastic, you’ll miss a hundred because you weren’t enthusiastic enough.
- Zig Ziglar
The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward.
- Winston Churchill
Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.
- Elon Musk
Leadership isn’t something that people hand to you. … [i]t’s a gradual process, one where you take responsibility years before you are given authority. And that’s something we can teach.
- Seth Godin
I said one time that it shouldn’t matter who counts to 30 for filling up retail prescriptions, and I caught a lot of grief for that, and probably rightfully so. But that wasn’t the point. The point is that putting pills in a bottle doesn’t change health outcomes. It doesn’t matter whether you get your pills at Walgreen or CVS or Kroger. The reality is: What happens with that process? Who is taking care of that patient? It’s not counting pills and sticking them in bottles. That doesn’t add any value.
- George Paz
It is always important that we have transparency, that we have shareholder protection. Then again, I think it is important that there are not so many regulations that management can’t make a decision without asking a lawyer whether he can do it.
- Michael Otto
I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.
- John D. Rockefeller
At an early age, my mother gave me this feeling that anything is possible, and I believe that.
- Howard Schultz
I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it’s easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin’ man and the loner.
- Steve Martin
The truth is that finding happiness in what you do every day is so imperative.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Why should I clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I acquire.
- Henry Ford
Extraordinary results are directlydetermined by how narrow you can make your focus.
- Gary Keller
Six out of 10 Americans believe the American dream is dead according to a recent poll.
- CBSNews.com
Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
- Ben Horowitz
So you need two professions: the one you have studied all this time, and your other profession the profession of persuasion that allows you to make good use of all those years of education, practice and dues-paying.
- Jerry Vass
When you marry operating excellence with innovation, you multiply the value of your creativity.
- James C. Collins
Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it
- Aristotle
I’ve always had that gratitude that I had the opportunity to pursue my potential. So I think my story says that, when women are given the chance and the opportunity, that we can achieve a lot. We deliver. We can make the world a better place, one butt at a time.
- Sara Blakely
Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.
- Larry Page
There are some people that can get things done, and it seems there are others who just can’t. That’s why we move heaven and earth to retain our stars and the main reason we manage out our lowest performers – the bottom 10% at least – each year.
- David Novak
No, I’m not settling here. I’m going to keep pressing forward.
- Joel Olsteen
I have never found a ship I wanted to go down with
- Jack Nadel
God, You said Your favor is not for a season but for a lifetime.
- Joel Olsteen
Your workforce is your most valuable asset. The knowledge and skills they have represent the fuel that drives the engine of business – and you can leverage that knowledge.
- Harvey Mackay
I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.
- Seth Godin
A story is at its best when it’s not intrusive, when it brings value to a platform’s consumers, and when it fits in as a natural step along the customer’s path to making a purchase.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
When the pressure is on, great leaders are at the their best.
- Napoleon Hill
You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war. – To Neville Chamberlain
- Winston Churchill
On Facebook, the definition of great content is not the content that makes the most sales, but the content that people most want to share with others.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.
- Winston Churchill
Know your numbers’ is a fundamental precept of business.
- Bill Gates
In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
- Dale Carnegie
When you’re building a business or joining a company, you have to be transparent; you can’t have two sets of information for two sets of people.
- Howard Schultz
Pick the best people, face the reality (the way it is), speak with candor to everything, never lose sight of the relationship with the constituency.
- Jack Welch
Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.
- Peter Thiel
Those who are blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.
- Mary Kay Ash
No one is guaranteed a job in this.
- Jack Welch
When I think about parallels between myself and an Olympian, I believe that success in the world of business is underpinned by very similar principles of perseverance and hard work.
- Lakshmi Mittal
I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along with it.
- Walt Disney
If you’re going to have to swallow a frog, you don’t want to have to look at that sucker too long!
- Zig Ziglar
Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.
- Jeff Bezos
If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm.
- Vince Lombardi
I’m not ashamed of any of my papers at all and I’m rather sick of snobs that tell us that they’re bad papers, snobs who only read papers that no one else wants. I doubt if they read many papers at all.
- Rupert Murdoch
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
- Peter Drucker
OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me ‘Trey’ because I’m William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I’m also known.
- Bill Gates
I know Bo Xilai well. But our relationship was based on our work, we didn’t have a personal relationship.
- Wang Jianlin
Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.
- George Soros
Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked, leadership is defined by results not attributes.
- Peter Drucker
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there.People will follow.
- Seth Godin
The most obvious market segment in email-based payments was the millions of emigrants still using Western Union to wire money to their families back home. Our product made that effortless, but the transactions were too infrequent.
- Peter Thiel
We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren’t that many things people use twice a day.
- Larry Page
Dream more than others think practical.
- Howard Schultz
One of the things that school is for is to teach our children to understand and relish the idea of intellectualism, to develop into something more than a purpose-driven tool for the industrial state.
- Seth Godin
Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.
- Larry Ellison
How do you tap in to what God has already done? Very simple: just act like you’re blessed, talk like you’re blessed, walk like you’re blessed, think like you’re blessed, smile like you’re blessed, dress like you’re blessed. Put actions behind your faith, and one day you will see it become a reality.
- Joel Olsteen
If values do not affect daily life, they are not values.
- Marty St. George
Economic cycles are just like riding on a Ferris wheel.
- Cheng Yu-tung
If you ask me what I worry about every morning when I wake up, it’s that I don’t understand future mainstream Internet users’ habits.
- Ma Huateng
Leadership is not dictatorship
- Tony Hsieh
Last I looked – and I’m not a candidate – but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It’s most states are winners take all.
- Michael Bloomberg
This book, then, is a product of the last fifteen years, as well as a product of the fifteen years that preceded them. It was almost exactly eight years before The E-Myth was published that I founded our company, E-Myth Worldwide, which has provided the fuel and experience for the point of view I have shared with those of you who have read The E-Myth, and with those.
- Michael Gerber
There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.
- Winston Churchill
I’ve got to confess I’m a pragmatic optimist myself.
- Zig Ziglar
It took Flickr two years to reach the milestone of 100 million uploaded pictures. It took Instagram eight months
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I may be over the top on this, but I just don’t want to like my competitors. I want my people to believe that whenever he and our other competitors succeed, we will be less able to do all the things we want to do.
- Phil Knight
There are things money can’t buy and hard work can’t win. One of them is happiness.
- Ray Kroc
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
If you do not see yourself as a winner, you cannot perform as a winner.
- Zig Ziglar
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
- Samuel Beckett
The construction arm of the Group always firmly adheres to the principle of ‘People is our priority’ and deploys a vast amount of resources to quality facilities and training of staff to ensure a safe and good working environment.
- Lee Shau Kee
We can’t have democracy if we’re having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we’ve never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.
- Larry Page
In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive.
- Bill Gates
Nobody walks this earth thinking he’s better than I think I am – I think I’m great. At the same time, it’s so obvious to me that I’m nobody.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.
- Napoleon Hill
Bell took the opposite approach, building multiple restaurants in a single neighborhood to eliminate the competition. It’s a strategy that’s widely used today by many companies like Starbuck’s, Barnes & Noble, and many others, and it worked for Bell.
- David Novak
I was only the servant of my country and had I, at any moment, failed to express her unflinching resolve to fight and conquer, I should at once have been rightly cast aside.
- Winston Churchill
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
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
Faith activates God – Fear activates the Enemy.
- Joel Olsteen
He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.
- Winston Churchill
By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.
- Mark Zuckerberg
To connect with people in a group, connect with them as individuals.
- John Maxwell
It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
- Paul Graham
And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.
- Seth Godin
My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.
- Winston Churchill
