Notable Quotables

I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.

- Jack Dorsey

If you want to build a dynasty, you need to always be focused on getting better and beating last year’s performance in everything you do. You want to eliminate peaks and valleys, what we call boom, splat, and go for a good steady incline.

- David Novak

Future public education will require involvement and collaboration among various local, civic, private and nonprofit entities, a concept I like to refer to as ‘community entrepreneurship.’

- Donald Bren

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.

- Napoleon Hill

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

- Og Mandino

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

- Joel Olsteen

I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment…..the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy. A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.

- Peter Drucker

We want to be the most predictable, boring growth company.

- John Chambers

Kremlin political intrigues are comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.

- Winston Churchill

Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.

- Bill Gates

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.

- James C. Collins

The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don’t know.

- Seth Godin

Once you’ve engaged with an organization or a relationship or a community, you owe it to your team to start. To initiate. To be the one who makes something happen. To do less is to steal from them. If you hide your spark, bury your ideas, keep your questions and notions from the team, you have hurt them as badly as if you had stolen a laptop and fenced it on eBay.

- Seth Godin

That was so much fun. It’s been such a neat experience racing with these guys.

- Ed Clark

The goal is to be able to live your life the way Michael Jordan played basketball, or Marvin Gaye sang a song. To be able to feel the way you feel when you laugh at a joke, but to feel that way all the time.

- Russell Simmons

Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.

- Rupert Murdoch

Decisiveness is a characteristic of high performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all.

- Brian Tracy

So now, having learned from machines, organizations are applying the same logic to people. Letting people in the organization use their best judgment turns out to be faster and cheaper—but only if you hire the right people and reward them for having the right attitude.

- Seth Godin

Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.

- Oprah Winfrey

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.

- Thomas Edison

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That’s a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

- Ben Horowitz

I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.

- Jerry Seinfeld

God wants us to live consistently, He wants us to enjoy every single day of our lives.

- Joel Olsteen

When you are truly interested in other people, you will learn what they are interested in and if they have a need for your product. If they like you, and most people like folks who take an interest in them, they’ll help you find people who do need what you have to sell, even if they don’t.

- Zig Ziglar

Why does a 67-year-old guy who got his start running an athletic shoe company think he can enter a field famous for gobbling up fortunes.

- Phil Knight

We are beginning to see the benefits of global consolidation.

- Lakshmi Mittal

I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same – they give the exact same advice. It’s like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.

- Ben Horowitz

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

- Winston Churchill

Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started ‘Wine Library TV.’ They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.

- Joel Olsteen

The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

- Dale Carnegie

Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.

- Seth Godin

When overtaken with the temporay feelings of potential failure, burn all of your bridges of retreat, thus making retreat impossible.

- Napoleon Hill

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

- Moliere

I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.

- Bill Gates

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the ‘naturals’, the ones who somehow know how to teach.

- Peter Drucker

One piece of advice that always stuck in my mind is that people should be respected and trusted as people, not because of their position or title.

- Herb Kelleher

The people of Southwest have always been my pride, my joy and my love. Their indomitable dedication and esprit de corps have taken Southwest from a three-airplane dream to a 500-airplane reality.

- Herb Kelleher

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.

- John C. Maxwell

Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage.

- Howard Schultz

Once Microsoft lost its grip on developers, it became only a matter of time before it lost its monopoly on operating systems.

- Ben Horowitz

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is “creative destruction.

- Peter Drucker

Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.

- Bill Gates

I see this as my humanitarian legacy. We’re prepared to pay billions.

- Sheldon Adelson

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

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’

- Jeff Bezos

Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don’t have investments in.

- Ben Horowitz

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

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

- Jeff Bezos

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

Desire is created when something happens in your life that suddenly changes the way you see yourself in relationship to your future.

- Zig Ziglar

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.

- Elon Musk

The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is ‘Don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.’

- Ben Horowitz

The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

- George Lucas

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

- Richard Branson

Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.

- Dale Carnegie

Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward….

- Thomas Edison

We think when God speaks to us, there’s going to be a boom out of Heaven or we’re going to get some chill bumps, but I really believe God’s talking to us all the time. He’s talking to us right in here. I call it our heart, our conscience, but it’s the Holy Spirit talking to us.

- Joel Olsteen

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

- Mark Twain

I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

- Elon Musk

Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.

- John C. Maxwell

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

- Ben Horowitz

If I were to retire, I would keep my family’s interest in the company the same and say, Don’t sell.

- Sheldon Adelson

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

- Joel Olsteen

If you look upon chronic diseases as an epidemic, and you see that the chronically ill are the poor, then you see that this issue of the uninsured is not really a moral but a financial obligation to change health care.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

On many long journeys have I gone. And waited, too, for others to return from journeys of their own. Some return; some are broken; some come back so different only their names remain.

- Yoda

Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn’t you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn’t most of them turn out all right after all?

- Dale Carnegie

Diplomacy is the art of saying Nice Doggie until you can find a rock.

- Will Rogers

A plan is always successful if the plan is good.

- Zig Ziglar

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

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

- Winston Churchill

You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.

- Seth Godin

He possessed a sense of calling in both religion and business, with Christianity and capitalism forming the twin pillars of his life.

- Ron Chernow

To be a champion, you have to learn to handle stress and pressure. But if you’ve prepared mentally and physically, you don’t have to worry.

- Harvey Mackay

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

- Steve Wozniak

I’m not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.

- Steve Ballmer

A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it’s harder to turn quickly.

- Tony Hsieh

It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.

- Winston Churchill

If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

- Peter Thiel

I was taken by the power that savoring a simple cup of coffee can have to connect people and create community.

- Howard Schultz

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

About half of our wives do not work outside the home. The number-one occupation for those wives who do work is teacher.

- Thomas J Stanley

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.

- Og Mandino

If you go to a bad movie, it’s two hours. If you’re in a bad movie, it’s two years.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I’d be happy to provide advice if anybody asked me no matter who the President is.

- Michael Bloomberg

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