The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn’t think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.
- Steve Ballmer
Notable Quotables
I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.
- Jeff Bezos
In our day Capital, Business Ability, and Manual Labor are the legs of a three-legged stool. While the three legs stand sound and firm, the stool stands; but let any one of the three weaken and break, let it be pulled out or struck out, down goes the stool to the ground. And the stool is of no use until the third leg is restored.
- Andrew Carnegie
We must … balance the fact that innovation inside the network is just as important as innovation in services and devices connected to the Internet. Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to engage in pro-competitive network management techniques to alleviate congestion, ameliorate capacity constraints, and enable new services.
- John Chambers
The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward.
- Winston Churchill
You can be in the storm, but don’t let the storm get in you.
- Joel Olsteen
What you get by reaching your destination is not nearly as important as what you will become by reaching your destination.
- Zig Ziglar
The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.
- Phil Knight
I learned about why startups should train their people when I worked at Netscape. People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense.
- Ben Horowitz
A lack of realism in the vision today costs credibility tomorrow.
- John C. Maxwell
It’s absolutely true that unless you can instill discipline upon yourself, you will never be able to lead others.
- Zig Ziglar
There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.
- Phil Knight
I love people, and the hustle.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Only God can look at somebody’s heart.
- Joel Olsteen
Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money.
- Donald Trump
Pride deafens us to the advice or warnings of those around us.
- John C. Maxwell
To be awake is to be fully present, no noise, just you and God. Most of us only have seconds of full consciousness. To live in a state of Samadhi – that’s what we’re here for.
- Russell Simmons
[On a small business class taught at university by Frank Shallenberger] Shallenberger started by defining the type of person who was an entrepreneur, and I realized he was talking to me.
- Phil Knight
But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.
- Dale Carnegie
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
- Winston Churchill
And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.
- Seth Godin
There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
- Sam Walton
Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.
- Bill Gates
It encourages you to focus on your work and the generosity that comes from interacting with (and helping) your community.
- Seth Godin
The beauty of this deal is bringing a clinical expertise. Medco had developed therapeutic resource centers, where they got their pharmacist to have specialties in things like diabetes, heart problems and asthma. Express Scripts took a different approach. We tried to understand why people do what they do with behavioral economics, which is: What drives human behaviors? What drives people to do what they did? By combining those two pieces, we get that much stronger.
- George Paz
MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once.
- Peter Thiel
God, Family, Country.
- Zig Ziglar
The Habit of Indiscriminate Spending.
- Napoleon Hill
Early must I rise. Leave now you must!
- Yoda
And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.
- Winston Churchill
Nobody ever accused me of wisdom of any kind, let alone conventional.
- Phil Knight
Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It’s more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.
- Bill Gates
In the early days, I really felt the pain of not being able to find information easily. I guess that helped me to develop an urge to write things like a search engine.
- Robin Li
Starting a company is a very tough thing. There’s a friend of mine, Bill Lee, whose phrase is ‘starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.’ So you should certainly expect that it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be harder than getting a job somewhere by a pretty good margin and the odds of you losing the money that you invested or your friends invested is pretty high. I mean, those are just the basic facts. So if you don’t mind things being really hard and high risk, then starting a company is a good idea. Otherwise, it’s probably unwise. It will certainly stress you out. So I think you have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
- Elon Musk
If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.
- Jeff Bezos
It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, first to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous…
- Winston Churchill
Mobile is a lot closer to TV than it is to desktop.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician.
- Michael Gerber
Surprises and reverses can serve as an incentive for great accomplishment. There are no rules here, we’re just trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison
For me, learning to my control my temper has been a lifelong process. So has the process of being will to take risks, make mistakes and be grateful for the other person, even if I may no longer speak to or do business with that person. When I reflect back on my life, I would say that it is this mental attitude that has made me the most money, has brought me the most success, and has ultimately allowed me to have the most magic in my life.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The way to get things done,” says Schwab, is to stimulate competition. I do not mean in a sordid, money-getting way, but in the desire to excel.
- Dale Carnegie
You can win more friends with your ears than with your mouth. People who feel like they’re being listened to feel accepted and appreciated. They feel like they’re being taken seriously and what they say really matters.
- Harvey Mackay
Lost time is never found again.
- Benjamin Franklin
Successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
- Peter Thiel
Time can be an ally or an enemy. What it becomes depends entirely upon you, your goals, and your determination to use every available minute.
- Zig Ziglar
I try to help people with management stuff a lot.
- Ben Horowitz
I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.
- Oprah Winfrey
Determine your destiny or somebody else will.
- Jack Welch
It’s so easy to tweet from wherever you are.
- Jack Dorsey
The abundance mindset makes it easier to be graceful.
- Seth Godin
For good or for ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank.
- Winston Churchill
It it impossible to comprehend Rockefeller’s breathtaking ascent without realizing that he always moved into battle backed by adundant cash. Whether riding out downturns or coasting on booms, he kept plentiful reserves and won many bidding contests simply because his war chest was deeper. Rockefeller vividly described the way he had hastily enlisted the aid of bankers to snap up one rifinery: It required many hundreds of thousands of dollars and in cash, securities would not answer. I received the message at about noon, and had to get off on the 3 o’clock train. I drove from bank to bank asking each president or cashier, whomever I could find first, to get ready for me all the funds he could possibly lay hands on. I told them I would be back to get the money later. I rounded up all of our banks in the city, and made a secondary journey to get the money, and kept going until I secured the necessary amount. With this I was off on the 3 o’clock train and closed the transaction.
- Ron Chernow
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
You may think you’ve got a long way to go, but you need to look back at how far you’ve already come. You may not be everything you want to be but atleast you can thank God that you’re not what you used to be.
- 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
In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where he wants to go, and gets up and goes.
- John Erskine
With an export-driven economy, Hong Kong is unavoidably affected by any hiccup in the outside world.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Why do you ask so much?
- Lee Shau Kee
God puts people in our lives on purpose so we can help them succeed and help them become all He created them to be. Most people will not reach their full potential without somebody else believing in them.
- Joel Olsteen
[On Twitter] This company is bigger than any individual.
- Jack Dorsey
Politics and government are certainly among the most important of practical human interests.
- P.T. Barnum
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
- Thomas Edison
I’m a reverend and a pastor. A pastor of the church. I go by usually pastor
- Joel Olsteen
Within the first year of launching my company, Spanx, I decided to go over to England and cold-call Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Selfridges the same way I had cold-called Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s here in the United States.
- Sara Blakely
Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn’t really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn’t until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Worry is interest paid before it’s due.
- Zig Ziglar
There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.
- Ben Horowitz
Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.
- Elon Musk
We’re better than the rest of the country but we shouldn’t believe it too much.
- Peter Thiel
Who you are, is who you attract.
- John Maxwell
Comprehensive after-sale property management service is as important as building quality.
- Lee Shau Kee
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
I don’t know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.
- Paul Theroux
The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.
- Thomas Edison
I worry about losing a real talent. I hate losing a great leader more than anything. I also hate it when I have to manager out a good person for poor performance or for simply doing something that is not in sync with our values. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life and I’ve had to do it more than once, is fire a friend.
- David Novak
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
- Bill Gates
You will find only what you bring in.
- Yoda
I don’t know where we should take this company, but I do know that if I start with the right people, ask them the right questions, and engage them in vigorous debate, we will find a way to make this company great.
- James C. Collins
A waitress goes up to Winston Churchill and says, ‘Sir, your drunk.’ To which he replies, ‘I may be drunk, miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
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
People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.
- Elon Musk
Nobody kicks a dead dog.
- Dale Carnegie
Our road to success has included its shares of ups and downs, as we have had to cope with the often volatile nature of our chosen fields of specialisation. Yet, thanks to the strong foundations established by the dedication and hard work of our employees, we have always been able to weather the storms.
- Cheng Yu-tung
We have not journeyed all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
- Winston Churchill
I wanted to be a sailor, I wanted to sail the world, to navigate it.
- Jack Dorsey
No one has a transparent view of the world. In fact, we all carry around a personal worldview—the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world.
- Seth Godin
Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.
- Seth Godin
College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.
- Peter Thiel
Research what they did, how they did it and how you can do it better.
- Jack Nadel
When we began Starbucks, what I wanted to try to do was to create a set of values, guiding principles, and culture.
- Howard Schultz
Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.
- Peter Drucker
We will go forward… we will never go back.
- Michael Bloomberg
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
Potential means that you haven’t done it yet.
- David Novak
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
- Peter Drucker
Anyone would fight for things that matter, true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter
- Peter Thiel
Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation and I will be ruthless.
- Warren Buffett
When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.
- John C. Maxwell
