Notable Quotables

We’re better than the rest of the country but we shouldn’t believe it too much.

- Peter Thiel

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

I don’t want to kill ads. I think advertising is great, and I’m very aware that there’s multiple revenue streams in television, subscription and advertising. But I also don’t want to put my head in the sand, and I think the world is changing.

- Charles Ergen

No one can make you jealous, angry, vengeful, or greedy — unless you let him.

- Napoleon Hill

A decision without an alternative is a desperate gambler’s throw.

- Peter Drucker

For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you [Charles de Gaulle] and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.

- Winston Churchill

Who you attract is not determined by what you want. It’s determined by who you are.

- John Maxwell

The Silver Spoon, the best-selling Italian cookbook of the last 50 years.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

- Ray Kroc

I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us- everything that exists – proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.

- Thomas Edison

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I’m not an expert on how you get out of those things.

- Bill Gates

When enough people care about autism or diabetes or global warming, it helps everyone, even if only a tiny fraction actively participate.

- Seth Godin

Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective – doing less – is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. It’s that simple.

- Phil Knight

A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it’s less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.

- Bill Gates

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

- Dale Carnegie

People who build family businesses are not classically trained. They have to deal with an enormous amount of politics. You think corporate politics are tough? Go work for your dad or your mom.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The Group adopts a two-pronged strategy in its business development in mainland China. In the prime cities, the Group targets those prime sites with heavy pedestrian flow and easy access for development into large-scale complexes of exceptional design and quality. In the second-tier cities, which are mostly provincial capitals or municipalities with a preponderance of middle class residents, the Group focuses on large-scale developments so as to achieve an efficient use of land as well as long-term appreciation in property value.

- Lee Shau Kee

All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.

- Seth Godin

Do you ever worry’ asked Dale Carnegie, I replied: ‘No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?’

- Henry Ford

Network effects businesses must start with especially small markets.

- Peter Thiel

The successful leader must plan his work, and work his plan. A leader who moves by guesswork, without practical, definite plans, is comparable to a ship without a rudder. Sooner or later he will land on the rocks.

- Napoleon Hill

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

- Peter Thiel

We saw that a thousand results weren’t necessarily as useful as 10 good ones.

- Sergey Brin

Yes, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.

- Yoda

The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did

- Ben Horowitz

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

- Steve Jobs

No, I’m not settling here. I’m going to keep pressing forward.

- Joel Olsteen

I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don’t know.

- Bill Gates

Another noteworthy aspect is the strong free cash flow of more than €2 billion. This enabled us to reduce net indebtedness to its lowest level since 2006.

- Elmar Degenhart

I think what’s happening for me, it’s fun to see other things besides Facebook and Twitter take hold. The maturity of Tumblr as a real player is exciting. I think Pinterest has proved to be a major player. It’s fun to see Instagram become a major player. It’s fun to watch things like SnapChat, and Vine, try to vie to be the next thing.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

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

Assetts put money in your pocket. Liabilities take money out of your pocket.

- Robert Kiyosaki

We’d love to be involved with the creation of something very special, something quite large and something quite exciting.

- Richard Branson

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we will fall, but ‘when.’ There are no exceptions.

- John C. Maxwell

Building companies involves creating great wealth. If that means I am an oligarch, OK, it’s fine. But if being an oligarch is about buying football clubs, it is not for me.

- Alexei Mordashov

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

- Elon Musk

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

- Bill Gates

The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.

- Peter Drucker

The ultimate goal for a business owner is to build a company that he or she can one day sell, continue to scale, or even own passively. Most business owners reach for growth by working harder and personally trying to produce more. This is a flawed model that at best will lead to only moderate growth. At worst this strategy can literally put your entire company at risk.

- Jeff Hoffman

Apart from consolidating our position as a major property developer in Hong Kong, we have also been diversifying into other activities such as hotel businesses, construction and engineering, container terminal services and television industry…

- Cheng Yu-tung

I always saw myself wanting to do something deemed successful and good at the same time.

- Howard Schultz

This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors.

- Winston Churchill

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

- Napoleon Hill

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier.

- Bill Gates

We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like 10 or 20 years from now.

- Peter Thiel

Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.

- Ray Kroc

Hong Kong has remained a strong financial centre. It has a solid business environment and geographically, it is well located, being next to China. During this time, there is no city that can match it.

- Lee Shau Kee

You don’t ever want to sell, you want customers to sell.

- Clay Clark

I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.

- Sam Walton

One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.

- Jeff Bezos

Hewlett Packard Chairman Built Company by Design, Calculator by Chance.

- James C. Collins

I’ve changed my will to show my concern for animal rights.

- Stephen Wynn

Of course I needed somebody to run my new store, and I didn’t have much money, so I did something that I would do for the rest of my run in the retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent. That’s when I made my first real hire, the first manager, Willard Walker.

- Sam Walton

Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.

- Ben Horowitz

True success is when you reach back and bring somebody along with you.

- Joel Olsteen

Well, you know, News Corp is the only real media global – that has a global presence that’s involved in TV production, in movies, in publishing, in newspapers, digital media, et cetera. So for a company like that to function, clearly it does not depend only on Rupert Murdoch or James Murdoch.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Sooner or later, you will see a China-based company that really has a global impact, and I think Baidu has a chance to become one of those companies. We should be able to compete on a global basis.

- Robin Li

Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.

- Peter Thiel

You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.

- Larry Ellison

Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make

- Donald Trump

For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.

- Peter Thiel

Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

- Peter Thiel

Clear your mind must be, if you are to find the villains behind this plot.

- Yoda

The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work in a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

- Seth Godin

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.

- Steve Martin

I tried to build a company my father would have been proud to work for, that he would have looked back on and said, ‘That’s the company that honoured me, even though I don’t have an education’. I wanted to build a company that had a conscience.

- Howard Schultz

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

- Sam Walton

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

- Napoleon Hill

Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires.

- Seth Godin

Sam phoned to tell me he was going to start a wholesale club. It was no surprise. He is notorious for looking at what everybody else does, taking the best of it, and then making it better.

- Sol Price

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

- Warren Buffett

It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.

- Warren Buffett

Today, we’ve begun to make the extraordinary historic films of the National Archives available to the world for the first time online. Students and researchers whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon.

- Sergey Brin

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

- Mark Zuckerberg

The world got enamored with smartphones and tablets, but what’s interesting is those devices don’t do everything that needs to be done. Three-D printing, virtual-reality computing, robotics are all controlled by PCs.

- Michael Dell

I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

- Bill Gates

We also now believe that this slowdown in capital spending could extend beyond two quarters.

- John Chambers

I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.

- Andrew Carnegie

Your real boss is the one who walks around under your hat.

- Napoleon Hill

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy, profit from folly rather than participate in it.

- Warren Buffett

The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

- Bill Gates

Andy Andrews is the best speaker I have ever seen.

- Zig Ziglar

He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.

- Ray Dalio

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