How much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes?
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
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.
- Peter Thiel
In the United States, where we have more land than people, it is not at all difficult for persons in good health to make money.
- P.T. Barnum
It’s our obligation to use the law to the furthest possible means to protect our users’ privacy. It’s just a legal and ethical principle.
- Sergey Brin
No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.
- Bill Gates
Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
- Ben Horowitz
My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It’s their work that I’m supporting. So it’s not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.
- George Soros
I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical.
- Bill Gates
This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
- Peter Thiel
The arrival of the 21st century precedes the onslaught of turmoil and tsunami. The business environment has become unpredictable and the global economy even harsher…
- Cheng Yu-tung
Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.
- Peter Thiel
I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope. Causing people to have better relationships. I’m not leading them to some false God or something like that.
- Joel Olsteen
Marketing is every bit of contact your company has with anyone in the outside world. Every bit of contact. That means a lot of marketing opportunities. It does not mean investing a lot of money.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
God can do in a split second what might otherwise take you many years.
- Joel Olsteen
Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. And once they arrive at Goldman, they find that even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It’s still optimistic—you wouldn’t play in the markets if you expected to lose—but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.
- Peter Thiel
If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you.
- Dale Carnegie
when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good.
- Dale Carnegie
I’ve always had that gratitude that I had the opportunity to pursue my potential. So I think my story says that, when women are given the chance and the opportunity, that we can achieve a lot. We deliver. We can make the world a better place, one butt at a time.
- Sara Blakely
Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.
- Ray Kroc
I think I will always have a connection to young people, to try to bring their voices to the polls, bring their voices wherever they can make a difference.
- Russell Simmons
There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one.
- Winston Churchill
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.
- Jeff Bezos
It doesn’t matter who likes you or doesn’t like you, all that matters is that God likes you. He accepts you, he approves of you.
- Joel Olsteen
And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.
- Peter Drucker
Why don’t you start believing that no matter what you have or haven’t done, that your best days are still out in front of you.
- Joel Olsteen
As a rule, theory does not precede practice. Its role is to structure and codify already proven practice. Its role is to convert the isolated and “atypical” from exception to “rule” and “system,” and therefore into something that can be learned and taught and, above all, into something that can be generally applied.
- Peter Drucker
Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to ‘gamble’ on an unknown.
- Zig Ziglar
The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.
- Walt Disney
We need to understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment is what you do to someone, discipline is what you do for someone.
- Zig Ziglar
If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.
- Ben Horowitz
Starbucks is not an advertiser; people think we are a great marketing company, but in fact we spend very little money on marketing and more money on training our people than advertising.
- Howard Schultz
Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
- Dale Carnegie
Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what’s coming.
- Steve Martin
I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.
- Ben Horowitz
Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.
- John C. Maxwell
It’s my view that solar energy may be the ultimate solution for energy for most of the world. I believe, based on what little I know about it, that there is a possibility of a breakthrough.
- Donald Bren
Starbucks has stores in America in many, many communities that are governed by many, many different municipalities. Starbucks cannot dictate to a municipality in Cincinnati or Kansas City or Sacramento how or why or when there should be a recycling program.
- Howard Schultz
I DECLARE Ephesians 3:20 over my life. God will do exceedingly, abundantly above all that I ask or think. Because I honor Him, His blessings will chase me down and overtake me. I will be in the right place at the right time. People will go out of their way to be good to me. I am surrounded by God’s favor. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
wouldn’t that person be even more amazing if, instead of telling the time, he or she built a clock that could tell the time forever, even after he or she was dead and gone?
- James C. Collins
Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.
- Brian Tracy
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
- Larry Page
[On the Swoosh] 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
- Phil Knight
As the economy shifts, large (and small) organizations are discovering that this brainwashing thing was a huge error. You can’t snooze your way to greatness. You can’t optimize your way to surprising growth. You can’t organize your way into blamelessness.
- Seth Godin
What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.
- Bill Gates
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
You know, the diversity that America has is so special. It’s starting to really become a cool thing for young people.
- Russell Simmons
The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn’t have that kind of personality, and it’s a terrifying thing to say.
- Jerry Seinfeld
About 80% of our locations are second-generation. In other words, the building used to be, say, a Wal-Mart that moved out to become a Super Wal-Mart, or a Kmart that closed. It seems that such a site becomes available almost every year in every city.
- David Green
Do all you can to make your dreams come true.
- Joel Olsteen
The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.
- George Soros
We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We hav before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I answer in one word: Victory…victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is not survival. Letter to Hitler
- Winston Churchill
Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.
- Peter Drucker
The lizard isn’t listening and the lizard doesn’t care.
- Seth Godin
The funny thing is people won’t let me pay for things. I’ll be in a restaurant and the manager will say, ‘Oh nom it’s on the house.’
- Richard Branson
From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.
- Peter Thiel
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
- Peter Drucker
When I was 17 or 18 I wanted to become a wine expert, and my parents wouldn’t let me drink. So I was devastated. All I could do was read, and I read and I read. And I’d read something like, you know, ‘Subtle hints of cassis.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
One of the jobs of a manager is to instill confidence, pump confidence into your people. And when you’ve got somebody who’s raring to go and you can smell it and feel it, give ’em that shot.
- Jack Welch
I like to play cards. I’m not very good, because I don’t want to calculate, I just play by instinct. But I’ve learned a lot of business philosophy by playing poker.
- Jack Ma
I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man…Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters – seldom in any school of writing.Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object….we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration:’The world is my country; to do good my religion.’Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in ‘The Rights of Man’, and that genius busy at his favorite task – liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, ‘The Rights of Man’ yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke’s effort in his ‘Reflections’.Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him.’Tom Paine is quite right,’ said Pitt, the Prime Minister, ‘but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.’Here we see the progressive quality of Paine’s genius at its best. ‘The Rights of Man’ amplified and reasserted what already had been said in ‘Common Sense’, with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France.So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre’s enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument.But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of ‘The Age of Reason’ and now turned his time to the latter part.Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events ‘The Age of Reason’ appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle – a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking.
- Thomas Edison
When you get a thing the way you want it, leave it alone.
- Winston Churchill
You don’t ever want to sell, you want customers to sell.
- Clay Clark
Every noteworthy achievement met with some sort of temporary setback before success came.
- Napoleon Hill
All companies of any size have to continue to push to make sure you get the right leaders, the right team, the right people to be fast acting, and fast moving in the marketplace. We’ve got great leaders, and we continue to attract and promote great new leaders.
- Steve Ballmer
We will be one of the most productive residential developers in China in the next few years.
- Lee Shau Kee
A magnificent blueprint, a loyal team and a well-coordinated organization… the same applies from ruling a country to maintaining a family.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.
- Jack Canfield
How many companies have you encountered that articulate a clear ideology at the start of the company, yet cannot articulate a clear idea of what products to make?
- James C. Collins
Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker – whom I had hired to manage the store from TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen and I had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could alone. We pledges houses and property, everything we had.. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.
- Sam Walton
Any colour – so long as it’s black.
- Henry Ford
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
- Jeff Bezos
I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
- Ben Horowitz
One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.
- Dale Carnegie
To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.
- Winston Churchill
So go ahead. Fall down. The world looks different from the ground.
- Oprah Winfrey
Word of mouth works now, much more than ever. @-reply every single person.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars – this is very important – so you don’t have to carry the return fuel when you go there.
- Elon Musk
Start where you are, with what you have. Make something of it and never be satisfied.
- George Washington Carver
Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.
- Richard Branson
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
- John D. Rockefeller
You have in the U.S. around two million new diagnoses of cancer a year, and 13 million survivors, so you have about 10,000 patients that require analysis every day. That’s about five petabytes that need to be transmitted and computed on a daily basis.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.
- Peter Thiel
The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
- Ben Horowitz
Value is achieved primarily through frontline employees who are satisfied, loyal, and productive, in part because of the high degree of capability they possess to deliver results to customers
- Service Profit Chain
I don’t think we’re going to run out of important things to do, compared with the resources that we have. There are many, many problems in the world that need solving.
- Larry Page
At the end, the acquisition of wealth is ignoble in the extreme. I assume that you save and long for wealth only as a means of enabling you the better to do some good in your day and generation.
- Andrew Carnegie
One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life.
- Napoleon Hill
The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.
- Warren Buffett
Any of us can be happy and have a good attitude when everything is going our way. But I believe it’s the real test of your character and of your faith to say, ‘Things are not going our way, but I’m still being good to people; I’m still attending church; I still have a good attitude.’
- Joel Olsteen
This Sunday School has been of help to me, greater perhaps than any other force in my Christian life, and I can ask no better things for you than that you, and all that shall come after you in this great band of workers for Christ, shall receive the same measure of blessedness which I have been permitted to have.
- John D. Rockefeller
People will always blame the poets for society’s ills. But these are the true artists.
- Russell Simmons
I try to do things that I think are helpful to the environment, to the animals, and to the planet.
- Russell Simmons
Churchill used words for different purposes: to argue for moral and political causes, to advocate courses of action in the social, national and international spheres, and to tell the story of his own life and that of Britain and its place in the world.
- Winston Churchill
Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good
- Ron Chernow
There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.
- Warren Buffett
When I finally retire, I just want to go away so no one has to listen to me.
- Steve Martin
To Admiral Cunningham it was against all tradition to abandon the Army in such a crisis. He declared, “It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.
- Winston Churchill
It would be nice to design a real briefcase – you open it up and it’s your computer but it also stores your books.
- Steve Wozniak
In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.
- Bill Gates
You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
- Bill Cosby
