Notable Quotables

Los líderes son vulnerables, no controladores, y nos llevan a un lugar nuevo, no a la seguridad barata, rápida y sumisa.

- Seth Godin

and the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger will hold people in the palm of his or her hand”

- Dale Carnegie

Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end.

- Napoleon Hill

It is no ordindary desire that survives disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism, and the constant reminding of waste of time. It is a burning desire an obsession! – Napoleon Hill (on leadership)

- Napoleon Hill

The difficult task is to marry relentless discipline with creativity, neither letting discipline inhibit creativity nor letting creativity erode discipline.

- James C. Collins

Keep the right perspective Some people would love to have your problems. They would gladly trade places with you. They would love to have the job that frustrates you. They would love to sit in traffic in that car you don’t like. They would love to have your husband, who gets on your nerves. They would love to live in the house you think is too small.

- Joel Olsteen

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

- Bill Gates

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.

- Bill Gates

Personally, I just hope that my family keeps getting bigger and bigger. That would make me very happy.

- Lee Shau Kee

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.

- Jack London

Our customers call and e-mai us to say that’s how it feels when a Zappos box arrives. And that’s how we view this company.

- Tony Hsieh

China and the U.S. need each other very badly. Yes, we should argue about some things, but it’s not an ‘us versus them,’ it’s an ‘us and them’ type scenario.

- Bill Gates

Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors—maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother’s recipe—your business is unlikely to survive.

- Peter Thiel

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

- Bill Gates

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

- Winston Churchill

Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.

- Peter Thiel

Since Henry Ford. It is changing the way every idea is handled, every product is created, every person interacts. It’s not going to be willing to make a detour around your gig, it’s not going to be interested in giving you a permanent sinecure. No, the revolution doesn’t care.

- Seth Godin

Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.

- Peter Thiel

Post-9/11, we saw an immediate uptick in the amount of people in our stores, all over the country. People wanted that human connection. We are not going to fracture the Starbucks experience.

- Howard Schultz

We’re talking about changing every aspect of our lives.

- John Chambers

I don’t like to beat people down. They need to be lifted up.

- Joel Olsteen

That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

- Peter Thiel

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

- Maya Angelou

It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.

- Elon Musk

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

As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Wal-Mart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy – the landlord’s son – out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet. Quite a few smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart’s growth. Some people have tried to turn it into this big controversy, sort of a Save the Small-Town Merchants deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes of something that has the right to be protected…If you become a large-scale success it’s Katie bar the door. Suddenly, you make a very convenient villian because everybody seems to love shooting at who’s on top.

- Sam Walton

I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.

- Rupert Murdoch

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

- Peter Thiel

You’ve been destined to live in victory, destined to overcome, destined to leave your mark on this generation.

- Joel Olsteen

There is a revolution happening, and within two years I think that Wi-Fi and Netflix will be built into all the televisions.

- Reed Hastings

I was fascinated with jeans, because you can impress your life upon the jeans you wear. The way you sit imprints on the jeans.

- Jack Dorsey

Everything that works in sales has been done already. Just keep track of the crap that you buy, or the awesome stuff that you buy, and decide what was the trigger, and then just sell to people like you. It’s really that easy – and that’s what I do.

- Timothy Ferriss

I believe in that Old Chinese Proverb, When the student is willing, the teacher appears. But I would add, It also doesn’t hurt to be a little proactive about it.

- David Novak

Nobody ever accused me of wisdom of any kind, let alone conventional.

- Phil Knight

You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.

- Reid Hoffman

The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

- Seth Godin

You are going to fire Mark Hurd and hire Leo? What I said at the time was that this was the best idea since the Apple board fired Steve Jobs. Really brilliant.

- Larry Ellison

Ultimately you want to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind

- Sergey Brin

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

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

- Howard Schultz

All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That’s why the word “salesman” can be a slur and the used car dealer is our archetype of shadiness. But we only react negatively to awkward, obvious salesmen—that is, the bad ones.

- Peter Thiel

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you’re an idiot.

- Steve Martin

I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.

- Larry Ellison

Failures are life’s way of nudging you and letting you know you are off course. Trying new things and not being afraid to fail along the way are more important than what you learn in school.

- Sara Blakely

You weren’t created to simply exist, to endure, or to go through the motions; you were created to be really alive.

- Joel Olsteen

Foreign politicians don’t have resources – or limited resources. It’s useless dealing with them.

- Wang Jianlin

In life and in business, you need to be good-hearted and trustworthy, and to have integrity. This is the way to build long-term relationships. It is also important to be optimistic and to look at challenges as opportunities.

- Henry Sy

The most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

- Ben Horowitz

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.

- John C. Maxwell

Ever since Justin Timberlake portrayed him in The Social Network, Sean has been perceived as one of the coolest people in America. JT is still more famous, but when he visits Silicon Valley, people ask if he’s Sean Parker.

- Peter Thiel

Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.

- Peter Drucker

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.

- James C. Collins

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

- Thomas Edison

The interesting products out on the Internet today are not building new technologies. They’re combining technologies. Instagram, for instance: Photos plus geolocation plus filters. Foursquare: restaurant reviews plus check-ins plus geo.

- Jack Dorsey

Following a period of drastic market fluctuations in Asia during the summer months of the previous year, economies in the region gradually improved and stabilised during the financial year.

- Lee Shau Kee

I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.

- Jeff Bezos

Churchill was in the lavatory in the House of Commons and his secretary knocked on the door and said: Excuse me Prime Minister, but the Lord Privy Seal wishes to speak to you. After a pause Churchill replied: Tell His Lordship: I’m sealed on The Privy and can only deal with one shit at a time.

- Winston Churchill

I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.

- Sam Walton

I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that’s a big deal. And if you’re going to be a leader – if you’re a leader and you’re the smartest guy in the world – in the room, you’ve got real problems.

- Jack Welch

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

- Henry Ford

The ‘morality of compromise’ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.

- Andrew Carnegie

Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.

- Ben Horowitz

My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.

- Joel Olsteen

We may get knocked down on the outside, but the key to living in victory is to learn how to get up on the inside.

- Joel Olsteen

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

- Elon Musk

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

- Elon Musk

The problem with common sense is that it’s not really that common. – David Novak CEO of Yum! Brands

- David Novak

The economy in Hong Kong remained on a declining path. Occurrence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (‘SARS’) in March this year led to a sharp drop in consumer spending and an increasing unemployment rate. The decline in the economy resulted in downward adjustment in the property market.

- Lee Shau Kee

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

- Jeff Bezos

Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don’t recover because trust is broken. And if you’re not honest at the point where you’re breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.

- Ben Horowitz

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I’ll never be hands-on on anything except software.

- Bill Gates

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I believe life is a series of near misses. A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see And pursuing that vision.

- Howard Schultz

In the old days, Hong Kong was undeveloped, coming from a low base. Now it is on a high base, making it difficult to earn high multiples. We will certainly diversify out of Hong Kong and out of property. [On being asked where?] I don’t know. I haven’t found it yet.

- Lee Shau Kee

Great opportunities can be and have been created during tough economic times.

- Howard Schultz

Much about success is just the result of simply the ability to follow up, follow through, and finish what we started.

- Zig Ziglar

Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today. Go another mile!

- Og Mandino

Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.

- William Feather

One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.

- Ben Horowitz

Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.

- Bill Gates

There’s a belief that you’re supposed to be poor, and suffering, and show your humility. I just don’t see the Bible that way. I see that God came and Jesus died so that we might live an abundant life and be a blessing to others.

- Joel Olsteen

Why is this mediocre? We love to point out how broken our systems are. We enjoy getting angry at hotels or government agencies or airlines that are so obviously doing a poor job. Idiots! But we almost never look at merely mediocre products and wonder why they aren’t great. Mediocre services or products do what they’re supposed to, but have set the bar so low that it’s hardly worth the energy to cross the street to buy them. A resolute generic sameness pervades this mediocrity. Why isn’t every restaurant meal a fabulous buy for the money? Why isn’t every tax dollar spent with the intensity and focus it could be spent with? It seems as though we are willing to accept mediocre as long as the product, the service, or the organization isn’t totally broken.

- Seth Godin

They told you to get your résumé in order, to punch your ticket, to fit in, and to follow instructions. They told you to swallow your pride, not to follow your dream. They promised trinkets and prizes and possibly riches if you would just suck it up and be part of the system, if you would merely do what you were told and conform. They sold you debt and self-storage and reality TV shows. They sold your daughters and sons, too.All in exchange for what would happen later, when it was your turn. It’s your turn.

- Seth Godin

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription