It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
- Henry Ford
Notable Quotables
I’m not a businessman — I’m a business, man.
- Jay-Z
Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.
- Ray Dalio
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The Habit of Saving does not mean that you shall limit your earning capacity, it means just the opposite – that you shall apply this law so that it not only conserves that which you earn, in a systematic manner, but it also places you in the way of greater opportunity and gives you the vision, the self-confidence, the imagination, the enthusiasm, the initiative and leadership actually to increase your earning capacity.
- Napoleon Hill
But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.
- Timothy Ferriss
We had no capital but we grew.
- Phil Knight
Quality is a cornerstone of the [Henderson] Group underpinning all our activities.
- Lee Shau Kee
Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress.
- Jeff Bezos
If you wake up deciding what you want to give versus what you’re going to get, you become a more successful person. In other words, if you want to make money, you have to help someone else make money.
- Russell Simmons
Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.
- Winston Churchill
You will need to find ways to do less and less to make more and more.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The evolving social and digital media platforms and highly innovative and relevant payment capabilities are causing seismic changes in consumer behavior and creating equally disruptive opportunities for business.
- Howard Schultz
The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.
- Thomas Edison
What options expensing will determine is job creation and job loss, … This is why we are debating it so strongly and I’m proud to champion it.
- John Chambers
David Novak CEO of YUM Brands (on crisis management)
- David Novak
I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.
- Timothy Ferriss
I’m not even sure what it’s getting at … personalities are very wrong although mine is closer … don’t forget that my purpose was inspired by the values of the Homebrew Computer Club along with ideas of the value of such machines and Steve J. wasn’t around and didn’t attend the club so he was the one learning about such social impact of the future.
- Steve Wozniak
What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.
- Admiral Jim Stockdale
There’s no point in… just giving them money
- Lee Shau Kee
This is why so many small and medium-sized businesses don’t use tools that bigger firms take for granted. It’s not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don’t exist: distribution is the hidden bottleneck.
- Peter Thiel
You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.
- Thomas J Watson
It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.
- Joel Olsteen
Bush’s war in Iraq has done untold damage to the United States. It has impaired our military power and undermined the morale of our armed forces. Our troops were trained to project overwhelming power. They were not trained for occupation duties.
- George Soros
My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids.
- Joel Olsteen
you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.
- Dale Carnegie
the major fears of modern man could be boiled down to two things: too much e-mail and getting fat.
- Timothy Ferriss
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
- Winston Churchill
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
- Bill Gates
Luck plays a role in business but whether you succeed or fail depends on many other factors. I haven’t really had a failure.
- Lui Che Woo
If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!
- Michael Gerber
Through the Force, things you will see. Other places. The future…the past. Old friends long gone.
- Yoda
It will be disastrous when a leader or manager shows up with one attitude one day and treats people with a different attitude the next day.
- Zig Ziglar
Flaming enthusiasm, backed by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.
- Dale Carnegie
We were guerilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit.
- Phil Knight
He spoke with more eloquence than wisdom.
- Winston Churchill
What has changed is that people have stopped working together.
- Michael Bloomberg
We must … balance the fact that innovation inside the network is just as important as innovation in services and devices connected to the Internet. Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to engage in pro-competitive network management techniques to alleviate congestion, ameliorate capacity constraints, and enable new services.
- John Chambers
How can I create something that critics will criticize?
- Seth Godin
Infrastructure web services had to happen.
- Jeff Bezos
The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That’s approaching evil.
- Jeff Bezos
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
- Helen Keller
You build trust with others each time you choose integrity over image, truth over convenience, or honor over personal gain.
- John C. Maxwell
I’m concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise. My dad taught me that when you borrow money it’s the worst day of your life.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about “let’s see” and “try.” If there’s no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated.
- Seth Godin
The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions… If people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.
- Mark Zuckerberg
One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.
- Richard Branson
My role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.
- Sam Walton
Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.
- Peter Drucker
When we face with a steady eye the difficulties which lie before us, we may derive new confidence from remembering those we have already overcome.
- Winston Churchill
I’ll trade glib for common sense any day.
- Stephen Wynn
You can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my own.
- Ron Chernow
Don’t be so nervous. It’s not a big deal.
- Lee Shau Kee
Kickstarter eliminates the risk that publishers and booksellers face. They have limited resources and limited shelf space, and Kickstarter is proof to them that something is going to work.
- Seth Godin
Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye, and you will be drawn toward it.
- 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
The difference between blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It’s scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.
- Russell Simmons
How has being realistic” or responsible” kept you from the life you want? How has doing what you should” resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?
- Timothy Ferriss
A much better idea would have been to give the problem to the people who could not only fix it, but who would also be personally excited and motivated to do so.
- Ben Horowitz
I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that’s what this organization does.
- Sergey Brin
Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.
- Colin Powell
Knowledge will not attract money, unless it is organized, and intelligently directed through practical plans of action…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
Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.
- Timothy Ferriss
Culture manages when management is not there.
- Joe Jordan
Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you’ll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens to be electric and it’s twice the efficiency of a Prius.
- Elon Musk
When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
- Winston Churchill
Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.
- Bill Gates
Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that’s something I’m accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn’t bother me.
- Timothy Ferriss
The best ideas in a company are the ones that people come up with themselves because then they really own their ideas and are committed to making them work. – David Novak CEO of YUM Brands
- David Novak
Do it now! can affect every phase of your life. It can help you do the things you should do but don’t feel like doing. It can keep you from procrastinating when an unpleasant duty faces you. But it can also help you do those things that you want to do. It helps you seize those precious moments that, if lost, may never be retrieved.
- Napoleon Hill
Every morning brings new potential, but if you dwell on the misfortunes of the day before, you tend to overlook tremendous opportunities.
- Harvey Mackay
The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.
- Ray Kroc
I think there’s a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
- Ben Horowitz
Lost time is never found again.
- Benjamin Franklin
Don’t sit around depressed and discouraged. Get a new vision for your life.
- Joel Olsteen
It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.
- Reed Hastings
If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?
- Dale Carnegie
Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I’ve learned that people will seldom let you down if they understand that your destiny is in their hands, and vice versa.
- Harvey Mackay
There’s no reason in 2014, to do shit you hate. NONE.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’
- Henry Ford
If we don’t end war, war will end us.
- Winston Churchill
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
There’s only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that’s already been written.
- Bill Gates
Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.
- Peter Thiel
Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.
- Richard Branson
If you live for the weekends and vacations, your shit is broken.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
You do not lead by hitting people over the head. That’s assault, not leadership.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.
- Warren Buffett
You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.
- 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
On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It’s very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.
- Jeff Bezos
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.
- Peter Thiel
I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.
- Warren Buffett
The people currently in charge have forgotten the first principle of an open society, namely that we may be wrong and that there has to be free discussion. That it’s possible to be opposed to the policies without being unpatriotic.
- George Soros
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.
- Elon Musk
This is indicative of how quickly CEO caution can put the foot on the brake.
- John Chambers
IT’S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.
- Jack Welch
Don’t use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe.
- Joel Olsteen