Notable Quotables

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t let any opportunity lead you away from serving God. That’s a price that’s too high to pay.

- George Foreman

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

- Bill Gates

We take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work.

- Ben Horowitz

Cultural industries will be the next engine for growth after real estate, and Wanda will make cultural industries our long-term focus.

- Wang Jianlin

The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.

- Peter Thiel

Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

- Bill Gates

If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can.

- Seth Godin

F-E-A-R has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.’ The choice is yours.

- Zig Ziglar

Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

No one ever wants to see his or her name linked to anything bad. Conscience is like a baby. It has to go to sleep before you can.

- Harvey Mackay

A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.

- Joel Olsteen

The garden gleams with summer jewelry. We live vy simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & well provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy.

- Winston Churchill

That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.

- Ben Horowitz

I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.

- Sam Walton

Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.

- Peter Drucker

While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.

- Ray Kroc

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

- Peter Drucker

Customers today are strongly value oriented. But just what does that mean? Customers tell us that value means the results they receive in relation to the total costs (both the price and other costs to customers incurred in acquiring the service).

- Gary W. Lo

I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.

- Bill Gates

Definite planning even went beyond the surface of this planet: NASA’s Apollo Program began in 1961 and put 12 men on the moon before it finished in 1972.

- Peter Thiel

If Google Books is successful, others will follow.

- Sergey Brin

I’m much more concerned about America than the Democratic Party.

- Howard Schultz

China will become the IT (information technology) center of the world. We believe in giving something back and truly becoming a Chinese company.

- John Chambers

The first three-and-a-half months of calendar year 2001 have been extremely challenging for many of us in high-tech.

- John Chambers

I think the most important thing that I think everyone in America must have is belief that wherever they live, whatever station they have in life, that the American dream is alive and well. I think the fracturing of trust and confidence is in the American dream.

- Howard Schultz

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

- Seth Godin

There are many different kinds of PCs. You have fixed, virtual, tablets, notebooks, ultrabooks, desktops, workstations. What you find in commercial PCs, business PCs, is that there’s a really long tail of usage on client devices.

- Michael Dell

The Successful leader must understand and apply the principle of cooperative effort and be able to induce his followers to do the same. Leadership calls for power and power calls for cooperation.

- Napoleon Hill

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?

- John Wooden

People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.

- Mark Zuckerberg

It’s easier to explain price once than to apologize for quality forever.

- Zig Ziglar

Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

Failure to me became not trying versus not succeeding.

- Sara Blakely

I won’t do something unless I can get at least two or three good laughs out of it. If I can’t, it’s not gonna make the team.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We have a very high churn rate, but as soon as we turn on email marketing to our user base, people will come back.” Yes, of course. The reason that people leave our service and don’t come back is that we have not been sending them enough spam. That makes total sense to me, too.

- Ben Horowitz

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

- Joel Olsteen

Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.

- Oprah Winfrey

But use the opposite technique – be liberal with your encouragement, make the thing seem easy to do, let the other person know that you have faith in his ability to do it, that he has an undeveloped flair for it – and he will practise until the dawn comes in the window in order to excel.

- Dale Carnegie

Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad.

- Donald Trump

The thing about fashion – it’s like ducks going quack, quack quack. It’s being dictated from above, and it just makes me want to rebel against it.

- Sara Blakely

It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because all that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.

- Mark Cuban

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.

- Herb Kelleher

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

- Mahatma Gandhi

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.

- Elon Musk

The question you should be asking isn’t, What do I want? or What are my goals? but What would excite me?

- Timothy Ferriss

You think Yoda stops teaching, just because his student does not want to hear? A teacher Yoda is. Yoda teaches like drunkards drink, like killers kill.

- Yoda

Remarkable visions and genuine insights are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths – whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over. If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it’s unlikely to be worth the journey. Persist.

- Seth Godin

The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.

- Winston Churchill

HE RICH DON’T WORK FOR MONEY The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.

- Santana

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

- Mark Zuckerberg

The special prosecutor basically supported what we had told the Board of Elections all along.

- Michael Ward

Most people have bosses who hire them to fill a slot in the work chart and to do what they are told. And most people who are doing what they are told feel safe, it feels reliable.

- Seth Godin

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

- Bill Gates

The foundation of success in life is good health: that is the substratum fortune, it is also the basis of happiness. A person cannot accumulate a fortune very well when he is sick.

- P.T. Barnum

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.

- Bill Gates

On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ What beliefs do you hold?’

- Michael Bloomberg

You can be committed to Church but not committed to Christ, but you cannot be committed to Christ and not committed to church.

- Joel Olsteen

Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.

- Peter Thiel

I think we are living in a time where the consumer has lots of choices, whether it’s coffee, newspapers or whatever it is. And there is parity in the market place, and as a result of that, the consumer is beginning to make decisions, not just on what things cost and the convenience of it.

- Howard Schultz

Fascinatingly, as companies begin to struggle, the third category always seems to grow much faster than the first. In addition, the sudden wave of “semi-performance-related attrition” usually happens in companies that claim to have a “super-high talent bar.” How do all these superstar employees suddenly go from great to crap?

- Ben Horowitz

When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew.

- Herb Kelleher

Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.

- Ray Kroc

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

- Jerry Seinfeld

Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.

- Zig Ziglar

Follow the GOLDEN RULE. Do unto others as you would have them do onto you.

- David Robinson

Constantly probe the people who report to you, and encourage them to probe you.

- Ray Dalio

You get to keep making art as long as you are willing to make the choices that let you make your art.

- Seth Godin

I think Starbucks created a platform and, ultimately, a runway for many other companies to emulate. I suspect if we had not achieved what we have, there would have been many regional brands that would have succeeded. But I’m not sure there would have been a national brand of the scope of Starbucks.

- Howard Schultz

Options – the ability to choose – is real power. This book is all about how to see and create those options with the least effort and cost. It just so happens, paradoxically, that you can make more money – a lot more money – by doing half of what you are doing now.

- Timothy Ferriss

Every great business is built on friendship.

- JC Penney

A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.

- Ben Horowitz

People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.

- Andrew Carnegie

There has never been a statue erected in honor of a critic.

- Zig Ziglar

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

- Bill Gates

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Another challenge is a phenomenon that I call the Law of Crappy People. The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.

- Ben Horowitz

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