Notable Quotables

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.

- Henry Ford

Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I like the word ‘autopilot’ more than I like the word ‘self-driving.’ ‘Self-driving’ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‘Autopilot’ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.

- Elon Musk

You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.

- Timothy Ferriss

Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.

- Stephen R. Covey

Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.

- Bill Gates

Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.

- Steve Martin

Don’t use your words to describe the situation. Use your words to change the situation.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Seth Godin

Learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.

- Jack Welch

Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon. Sorry I’m all out of cards. Boy, does your country ever eat up business cards.

- Phil Knight

It was not her sex appeal but the obvious relish with which she devoured the hamburger that made my pulse begin to hammer with excitement.

- Ray Kroc

Indeed, the real question is not, Why greatness?” but What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.

- James C. Collins

I’m surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms.

- Steve Wozniak

Play like you’re ten points behind in the final quarter. I’ve always heard this defined as operational cadence – creating a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of doing business that drives the relentless pursuit of results. Whatever I’ve learned about creating a sense of urgency started when I worked for Howard Davis at Tracy Locke. He really knew how to push people. Everything had to be done yesterday. And I was one of the people who go pushed. Howard was a master of intimidation. Everyone knew if you didn’t give him what he wanted, he was going to find another way to get it, and if your weren’t part of the solution then you were part of the problem. The clients loved Howard because they knew he’d kill for them (and none of us wanted to be killed). It wasn’t always comfortable, but it taught me the value of constantly putting pressure on myself and the people who work for me. In corporate America, pressure is a way of life, so rather that resist it or merely accept it, you have to learn to use it as a personal motivator.

- David Novak

Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.

- Michael Gerber

Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that’s fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.

- Bryan Adams

Frankly speaking, I decided to become a businessman at the moment when I understood that it is possible, because I grew up in a country where it was not possible. There existed even a special article in the penal code of the Soviet Union which punished entrepreneurial activity.

- Vladimir Potanin

I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.

- Charles Dickens

[Luke:] I can’t believe it. [Yoda:] That is why you fail.

- Yoda

If you’re passionate about something and you work hard, then I think you will be successful.

- Pierre Omidyar

If Google Books is successful, others will follow.

- Sergey Brin

When you network, your aim is to meet people who are going places in their lives. You want to meet people who are ahead of you in their careers and in their organizations. You want to meet people you can look up to with pride. You want to meet people who can be friends, guides and mentors.

- Brian Tracy

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

- Zig Ziglar

The bottom line is that you need to do follow-up or you will be mediocre.

- Chet Holmes

It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.

- Dale Carnegie

[On exporting sports shoes from Japan to the US]The best hope for exports lay with Onitsuka Company. So I made a cold call on them.

- Phil Knight

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

- John C. Maxwell

To reach your full potential, you have to set goals that will stretch you.

- Zig Ziglar

Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.

- Seth Godin

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

- Bill Gates

The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way.

- Seth Godin

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

- Steve Jobs

The millionaires and billionaires who chose to invest in Australia are actually those who most help the poor and our young. This secret needs to be spread widely.

- Gina Rinehart

I think that diversity is key for the next American entrepreneurs. They want to be a part of this society where there is so much diversity they have to have people from all the experiences.

- Russell Simmons

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.

- Bill Gates

The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.

- Dale Carnegie

Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.

- Bill Gates

It’s pretty chilly by southern California standards.

- Ed Clark

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.

- James C. Collins

Even if you don’t have the perfect idea to begin with, you can likely adapt.

- Victoria Ransom

Forty-five years ago, when I was 18, I came to San Francisco by boat and took two weeks to get here. I had a great impression. I think San Francisco is the welcoming gate for people from Asia.

- Tadashi Yanai

I’m going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.

- Joel Olsteen

By getting your customers to agree with you in small steps along the way, you have a better chance of reaching agreement when it’s time to do business.

- Harvey Mackay

What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Thus far then have we travelled along the terrible road we chose at the call of duty. The mood of Britain is wisely and rightly averse from every form of shallow or premature exultation. This is no time for boasts or glowing prophecies, but there is this: A year ago our position looked forlorn, and well nigh desperate to all eyes but our own. To-day we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: ‘We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.

- Winston Churchill

With vision and foresight, thorough consideration, careful planning and steadfast commitment, the New World Group will continue to maintain its ambitious yet healthy investment strategy to grow together with the nation and strive for greater success in the future.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Every dream I’ve ever had in life has come true ten times over.

- Steve Wozniak

The most “successful” companies seemed to embrace a sort of anti-business model where they lost money as they grew.

- Peter Thiel

Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want.

- Timothy Ferriss

I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

- Jeff Bezos

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

- Dale Carnegie

Control, control, you must learn control!

- Yoda

Selling and delivering a product is at least as important as the product itself.

- Peter Thiel

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?

- Winston Churchill

I think the definition of a book is changing.

- Jeff Bezos

The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.

- Timothy Ferriss

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

- Winston Churchill

Men sometimes stumble over the truth, but often pick themselves up and hurry off as though nothing had happened.

- Winston Churchill

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

Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.

- Seth Godin

The part of uranium that’s fissile – when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two – is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.

- Bill Gates

Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that’s what I think keeps me hungry.

- Warren Buffett

“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.”

- Sam Walton

I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn’t been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn’t have been lucky

- Oprah Winfrey

Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.

- Bill Gates

I do feel, in a sense, the rules of engagement for citizenship has changed, and we must encourage other people to speak up and to take action.

- Howard Schultz

There is no sale without the story, no knockout without the setup.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Levi Strauss headed for the gold fields of California to strike it rich in mining. However, he was not a good miner, so he instead began sewing pants out of canvas for the miners who were successful. Today I think most of the world has heard of Levi’s pants.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Nowhere are the benefits of closer economic ties more pronounced than in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The two places have their own advantages. One has the manpower, natural resources and manufacturing might, while the other has the management skills and marketing know-how.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Pick people who are interested in what you’re interested in.

- Russell Simmons

I’m not a businessman — I’m a business, man.

- Jay-Z

Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.

- Winston Churchill

I’m anti-tax, but I’m pro-carbon tax.

- Elon Musk

If the merit of the idea is strong, it spreads really quickly no matter who you are or where you are from.

- Jack Dorsey

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

How can we walk away from requirements that we know to be true to pursue something that we think will help?” 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.

- Ben Horowitz

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

- Jeff Bezos

In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.

- Peter Thiel

The opportunity of a lifetime is to pick yourself. Quit waiting to get picked; quit waiting for someone to give you permission; quit waiting for someone to say you are officially qualified and pick yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, but it does mean you stand up and say, ‘I have something to say. I know how to do something. I’m doing it. If you want me to do it with you, raise your hand.

- Seth Godin

Control your temper. Remember, you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.

- Dale Carnegie

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

- Seth Godin

Use technology to remind people that we are really human and civilization is meant to connect together. Civilization is meant to be easy, and the technology to completely disappear. And should be easy to pick up.

- Jack Dorsey

Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.

- Seth Godin

We should be able to significantly improve health-care outcomes. The government is needing that. When you look at ACOs [accountable care organizations] and look at what the Obama administration is talking about, in trying to improve quality, that’s exactly what Express Scripts does.

- George Paz

You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision. In this one particular at least, business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.

- Peter Thiel

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

- Winston Churchill

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