Notable Quotables

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy’s aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

- Winston Churchill

Everybody has equal opportunity, and I think that is true for everything.

- Mukesh Ambani

The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

- Timothy Ferriss

One of the statistics that always amazes me is the approval of the Chinese government, not elected, is over 80 percent. The approval of the U.S. government, fully elected, is 19 percent. Well, we elected these people and they didn’t elect those people. Isn’t it supposed to be different? Aren’t we supposed to like the people that we elected?

- Bill Gates

We got so much better so quickly it was hard to believe. We totally stood Kmart off in those small towns of ours. Almost from the beginning, they weren’t very successful at taking our customers away in Jeff City and Poplar Bluff. Once Kmart arrived, we worked even harder at pleasing our customers, and they stayed loyal. This gave us a great surge of confidence in ourselves. But at that time our sales were 5 percent of Kmart’s. (through competition) Wal-Mart has lowered the gross margin in retailing from around 35 percent in the early 60s to only 22 percent today.

- Sam Walton

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

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

- Bishop Desmond TuTu

Be happy with who God made you to be, and quit wishing you were something different.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?

- Steve Martin

Being aware of your fear is smart. Overcoming it is the mark of a successful person.

- Seth Godin

When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.

- Rupert Murdoch

A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.

- Elon Musk

In early 2009, the property market was still being driven by pessimistic sentiment and a wait-and-see attitude, leading to a further drop in the transaction volume.

- Lee Shau Kee

I like the book. Do you have a problem with that? … I just think it’s a great story of somebody who stood up for what they believe in.

- Travis Kalanick

If salespeople don’t probe well for background information, they don’t know how to launch the presentation.

- Jerry Vass

I never worry because I know who I am and I know Whose I am.

- Zig Ziglar

The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.

- Seth Godin

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

- Winston Churchill

Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. 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

You hope that one or both of them win a race right before our race. I know that in the past, when Bill Elliott won it always boosted sales here.

- Ed Clark

It’s absolutely a necessary and inevitable evolution in retailing (of Wal-Mart putting small stores out of business), as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car, and the dissappearance of the buggy whip makers. The small stores (and DJs) were destined to dissappear, at least in the numbers they once existed., because the whole thing is driven by customers, who are free to choose where to shop.

- Sam Walton

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.

- Bill Gates

The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves.

- Peter Drucker

The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.

- John C. Maxwell

Uber is “way more” evil than Google, the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley.

- Peter Thiel

Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.

- Ben Horowitz

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Of course, the challenge of being the initiator is that you’ll be wrong. You’ll pick the wrong thing, you’ll waste time, you’ll be blamed. This is why being an initiator is valuable. Most people shy away from the challenge. They’ve been too abused, they’re too fearful, they hold back, they’re happy to let someone else take the heat. Initiative is scarce. Hence valuable. Ditch digging is not scarce. It’s not hard at all to find manual labor at minimum wage, which is precisely why manual labor gets paid minimum wage. It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.

- Seth Godin

Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: Wouldn’t you like to have that? Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?

- Dale Carnegie

Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

- Clayton M. Christensen

I think the most productive thing to do during times of change is to be your best self, not the best version of someone else.

- Seth Godin

If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.

- Steve Wozniak

The future is in green energy, it’s in making steel for energy-efficient cars.

- Alexei Mordashov

In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example – and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.

- Rupert Murdoch

I cut the feet out of my control top pantyhose one night, threw them on under my white pants and realized that the toning and shaping was perfect and that the hosiery material is thin enough that I could make shape wear out of it.

- Sara Blakely

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Chance made us sisters. Hearts made us friends.

- Zig Ziglar

If you talk about Cabernet and Merlot-based value between $10 and $25, I will tell you that Bordeaux is the best value in the world.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

When I was in college, I was debating to try my hand at show business, or to become a professor. I just thought of the risk of not going into show business and always wondering if I would’ve had a chance. Because that’s where my real heart was.

- Steve Martin

When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.

- Ben Horowitz

The wealthy class often looks down on the poor as those people. And deprived people view the rich as cold and heartless. The way to break down the barrier between the rich and poor is to asociate with each other and to help one another. Make a connection. If you can break down the barrier, it may pave the way to recovery for some person, a family, maybe an entire community.

- George Foreman

Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.

- Henry Ford

Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, what do I want to do everyday for the rest of my life…do that.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?

- Sam Walton

Mind you, I got this reduction without saying a word about what I wanted. I talked all the time about what the other person wanted and how he could get it.

- Dale Carnegie

In the next two to three years there will probably be only three to five players in this area. The chances to gain or lose market share are exciting.

- John Chambers

“High expectations are the key to everything.”

- Sam Walton

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

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

- Phil Knight

If you will remain at rest and hold your peace, then the battle is not yours, but the battle is the Lord’s.

- Joel Olsteen

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.

- Napoleon Hill

To be a champion, you have to learn to handle stress and pressure. But if you’ve prepared mentally and physically, you don’t have to worry.

- Harvey Mackay

But it’s possible the orbits of the asteroids today show some memory of having had a planet in the asteroid belt.

- John Chambers

We can schedule for it. Thursday, April 3rd, 3:05…start something. We can train for it, plan for it, announce it, and even hire for it. If initiating is as essential to the modern organization as it appears, we better be doing all of that and more.

- Seth Godin

Disneyland will never be the completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.

- Walt Disney

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it’s not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, ‘Hey, I can’t really figure those things out.’

- Bill Gates

When you have no one to answer to, vendetta as investment strategy is as legitimate as anything.

- Carl Icahn

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

- John C. Maxwell

Exchanging practically all the British infantry and artillery in India for Territorial batteries and battalions, and the formation of the 27th, 28th and 29th Divisions of regular troops. The New Zealand contingent must be escorted to Australia and there, with 25,000 Australians, await convoys to Europe. Meanwhile the leading troops of the Canadian Army, about 25,000 strong, had to be brought across the Atlantic. All this was of course additional to the main situation in the North Sea and to the continued flow of drafts, reinforcements and supplies across the Channel. Meanwhile the enemy’s Fleet remained intact, waiting, as we might think, its moment to strike; and his cruisers continued to prey upon the seas. To strengthen our cruiser forces we had already armed and commissioned twenty-four liners as auxiliary cruisers, and had armed defensively fifty-four merchantmen. Another forty suitable vessels were in preparation. In order to lighten the strain in the Indian Ocean and to liberate our light cruisers for their proper work of hunting down the enemy, I proposed the employment of our old battleships (Canopus class) as escorts to convoys.

- Winston Churchill

The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism.

- Peter Thiel

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

- Alexander Graham Bell

The richest people in the world look for and build networks, everyone else looks for work.

- Robert Kiyosaki

As a general rule, everyone you involve with your company should be involved full-time. Sometimes you’ll have to break this rule; it usually makes sense to hire outside lawyers and accountants, for example. However, anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw a regular salary from your company is fundamentally misaligned.

- Peter Thiel

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

- Ben Horowitz

We knew that Lyft was going to raise a ton of money. And we are going [to their investors], Just so you know, we’re going to be fund-raising after this, so before you decide whether you want to invest in them, just make sure you know that we are going to be fund-raising immediately after.

- Travis Kalanick

Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today.

- Peter Thiel

So I’ve seen life as one long learning process. And if I see – you know, if I fly on somebody else’s airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn’t in – 21 years ago, then I’d think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I’d like to fly on.

- Richard Branson

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

- Bill Gates

My mother taught me something at a young age – she said ‘you are the company you keep’. To define yourself by some label or some level of resources – that’s pretty shallow.

- Howard Schultz

If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.

- Peter Thiel

Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

- Jeff Bezos

Lost a planet Master Obi-Wan has. How embarrassing …

- Yoda

I don’t like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.

- Bill Gates

Once the habit is ingrained and you become the starter, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to notice, to instigate, and to initiate. Momentum builds and you get better at generating it. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to initiate things all day the next day, you’ll wake up with a list. And as you create a culture of people who are always seeking to connect and improve and poke, the bar gets raised. What might be considered a board-level decision at one of your competitors’ companies gets done as a matter of course. What might be reserved for a manager’s intervention gets handled at the customer level, saving you time and money (and generating customer joy). This incredibly prosaic idea, the very simple act of initiating, is actually profoundly transformative. Forward motion is a defensible business asset.

- Seth Godin

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

If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.

- Dale Carnegie

Whatever the trend in exchange rates or whatever the external factors, a manufacturing company is always faced with the mission of transforming itself into a company that can produce higher value-added to absorb the increase in the cost of living in the country it’s operating in.

- Fujio Mitarai

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.

- Mario Andretti

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

- Dale Carnegie

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