Notable Quotables

THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill.

- Peter Thiel

Control has to be by feedback from the work done. The work itself has to provide the information. If it has to be checked all the time, there is no control.

- Peter Drucker

I never thought about success. I always thought about doing the job at hand. My goal was getting through the show that night.

- Steve Martin

Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don’t start, you never get a chance.

- Seth Godin

You’ll never rise any higher than the way you see yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

Giving should be entered into in just the same way as investing. Giving is investing.

- John D. Rockefeller

Google’s done a super good job on search. Apple’s done a great job on the iPod.

- Bill Gates

When your hobbies get in the way of your work – that’s OK, but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves… well.

- Steve Martin

Now that we had a name, we had to have a trademark for the side of the shoe. It was 1971, and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million, so I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State, and there was a woman there saying, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money for the dress for this prom,’ And I said, ‘I have a job for you.’ I paid her $2 an hour, and she spent 17 and a half hours. So $35 and she came up with what is now the swoosh.

- Phil Knight

Some things you can only learn in the struggle. When it’s easy, when everything is going your way, that doesn’t take any faith.

- Joel Olsteen

Well, I am a Republican, and I would run as a Republican. And I have a lot of confidence in the Republican Party. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the president. I think what’s happening to this country is unbelievably bad. We’re no longer a respected country.

- Donald Trump

A movement is thrilling. It’s the work of many people, all connected, all seeking something better.

- Seth Godin

I’m not speaking defeat into my future. I’m not speaking failure over my life. I will turn it around and speak favor into my future. I will declare, I’m blessed. I’m strong. I’m healthy. This will be a great year.” When you do that, you are blessing your future.

- Joel Olsteen

My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.

- Larry Page

An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.

- Jack Welch

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

- Bill Gates

Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.

- Bill Gates

Discipline is hard–harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.

- Atul Gawande

I absolutely don’t have $20 billion. But I’d love to, right?

- Jack Ma

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

- Mark Twain

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

- Winston Churchill

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

- Bill Gates

You can be a control freak only when you have weak people around you.

- Ronald Perelman

Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.

- Elon Musk

Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.

- Ben Horowitz

By faith you need to walk like a king, talk like a king, think like a king, dress like a king, smile like a king. Don’t go by what you see. Go by what you know. There is royalty in your DNA. You have the blood of a winner. You were created to reign in life.

- Joel Olsteen

I notice a difference from the moment I meditate.

- Ray Dalio

If you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big.

- Donald Trump

Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

- Yoda

don’t talk about the way you are. Talk about the way you want to be.

- Joel Olsteen

The people’s ability to achieve is determined by their leader’s ability to empower.

- Napoleon Hill

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

Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

- Dale Carnegie

Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it’s cute but boring and expensive.

- P.J. O'Rourke

My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.

- Mark Zuckerberg

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

- Bill Gates

The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!

- Steve Wozniak

Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it’s easier, it scales and it’s profitable. But people don’t like it – we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.

- Seth Godin

This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.

- Peter Thiel

Hope is the power that gives a person the confidence to step out and try.

- Zig Ziglar

Five percent of the people think;ten percent of the people think they think;and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.

- Thomas Edison

Bolsheviks create their own difficulties which they successfully overcame later.

- Winston Churchill

You can’t move people to action unless you first move them with emotion. The heart comes before the head…to lead yourself use your head, to lead others use your heart.

- John Maxwell

Other people and things can stop you temporarily. You’re the only one who can do it permanently.

- Zig Ziglar

Ten or twelve men, especially between brothers and between fathers and sons; but the offspring of these unions are counted as the children of the man with whom a particular woman cohabited first.

- Winston Churchill

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. The old proverb is full of truth and meaning, “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” Many a man acquires a fortune by doing his business thoroughly, while his neighbor remains poor for life, because he only half does it. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business. Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself.

- P.T. Barnum

You simply cannot manage people to better performance if you do not give candid, consistent feedback through a system that is loaded with integrity

- Jack Welch

I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy.

- Michael Gerber

Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it’s about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it’s less than one ton. It’s an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.

- Bill Gates

More people will yell and wave at you to tell you that you forgot to close the gas cap than the amount of people who will stop to tell you that you are going the wrong direction with your life.

- Clay Clark

Good intentions aren’t enough. People have good intentions when they set a goal to do something, but then they miss a deadline or other milestone.

- Harvey Mackay

A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.

- George Soros

Sound character provides the power with which a person may ride the emergencies of life instead of being overwhelmed by them. Failure is… the highway to success.

- Og Mandino

I enjoy the hunt much more than the ‘good life’ after the victory.

- Carl Icahn

If somebody can do something 80 percent as good as you think you would have done it yourself, then you’ve got to let it go.

- Sara Blakely

Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. HEBREWS 11:1.

- Joel Olsteen

Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.

- Yoda

Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen.

- Winston Churchill

The biggest part of my job now is to quickly develop successors, and around the world I am working to develop new business leaders in the company.

- Tadashi Yanai

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don’t count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

- Mukesh Ambani

When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: Try to bear lightly what needs must be. Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.

- Dale Carnegie

There are two main drivers of asset class returns – inflation and growth.

- Ray Dalio

As a businessperson, I don’t have the power to change the government. That is in the hands of the political leaders. However, as a taxpayer, we have the right to be critical of the government and demand change.

- Tadashi Yanai

With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain market share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device. But a lot of those users are frustrated. They can’t type. They can’t create documents.

- Bill Gates

This is like the Six Sigma approach to quality. Six Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units. The problem is that once you’re heading down this road, there’s no room left for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. Either you rolled ten strikes or you didn’t. Organizations that earn dramatic success always do it in markets where asymptotes don’t exist, or where they can be shattered. If you could figure out how to bowl 320, that would be amazing. Until that happens, pick a different sport if you want to be a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

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

A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck.So the question is: Have you ever done that?

- Seth Godin

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

- Elon Musk

I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.

- Rupert Murdoch

There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. An effective way to enforce this requirement is by withholding new employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training program.

- Andrew Grove

A lot of preachers’ kids are some of the most rebellious kids in the world. I never was like that.

- Joel Olsteen

De-escalating the rivalry post-merger wasn’t easy, but as far as problems go, it was a good one to have.

- Peter Thiel

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

- Elon Musk

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand – without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it….

- Thomas Edison

My mission is not to forbid French art. If the quality is there, I buy; if the quality isn’t there, I don’t.

- Francois Pinault

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.

- Steve Jobs

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Nothing remains permanent in the world, change is just the eternal fact.

- Cheng Yu-tung

It’s important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now. It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it’s been possible, and that window could be open for a long time – hopefully it is – or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.

- Elon Musk

My biggest crisis is that I don’t understand what young people like.

- Ma Huateng

You must go through the process before you get the product.

- Paul Pressey

I hate recording all the shows for the week in one day, because I want to be able to mention current events and pop culture. If Madonna punches Britney in the face today, I want to reference that on ‘Wine Library TV’ tomorrow. Monday’s episode is always the best, because it’s hot off the press.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Revolution has values, revolution has purpose. Revolution has direction. Revolution has leaders. Revolution looks at the intersection ahead and pushes people to do the right thing. And it doesn’t always have to be loud. It doesn’t always have to be violent. It’s just as powerful in it’s stillness.

- Jack Dorsey

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