Notable Quotables

I want to help people to help themselves, which is much more valuable for both sides than just making a donation. By training the child of a farmer you compound the value of that dollar spent on training since that child will now help their parents. This is the multiplier effect. There’s no point in just feeding them or just giving them money.

- Lee Shau Kee

Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new.

- Seth Godin

If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.

- Dale Carnegie

When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.

- Winston Churchill

Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.

- Steve Ballmer

A bunch of high-IQ people with the wrong kind of ambition won’t work.

- Ben Horowitz

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

- Elon Musk

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

- Bob Dylan

Cisco’s collaboration with AT&T and GI will result in a New World network that will fundamentally change the way communications services are delivered to the consumer market.

- John Chambers

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

We want Google to be the third half of your brain.

- Sergey Brin

Any time a company grows as fast as Wal-Mart has, pockets of duplication are going to build up, and there will be areas of the business which we may no longer need. No boss or employee really likes to dwell on such matters; it’s only human nature not to want to have your job, or the jobs of the people who work for you, eliminated. But it is absolutely the responsibility of a company’s top management to be thinking about this issue all the time – to ensure the sound future for the overall company.

- Sam Walton

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

- Henry Ford

We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.

- Henry Ford

Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.

- James C. Collins

What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do some thing about them.

- Henry Ford

If GE’s strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.

- Jack Welch

You have everything to gain and nothing to lose by trying. Success is achieved and maintained by those who keep trying with a positive mental attitude.

- Napoleon Hill

Young people in China and Hong Kong are the future of the motherland.

- Cheng Yu-tung

You may think you’re getting the short end of the stick, but when it’s all said and done, God will make sure that you don’t lose anything truly valuable. Moreover, He’ll make sure you get your just reward. Your responsibility is to remain calm and peaceable even when those around you are not.

- Joel Olsteen

Several families interviewed for this book recommended the oldest persuasive tool known to man: bribery. Each child is given some amounts of virtual cash, 25-30 cents, for each hour of good behaviour. The same amount is subtracted from their accounts for breaking the rules. All purchases for fun – whether souvenirs, ice cream, or otherwise – come out of their own individual accounts. No balance, no goodies. This often requires more self-control on the part of the parents than the children.

- Timothy Ferriss

To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.

- Sam Walton

Risk, to some, is a bad thing, because risk brings with it the possibility of failure. It might be only a temporary failure, but that doesn’t matter so much if the very thought of it shuts you down. So, for some, risk comes to equal failure (take enough risks and sooner or later, you will fail). Risk is avoided because we’ve been trained to avoid failure.

- Seth Godin

-Gardens, not buildings–Great projects start out feeling like buildings. There are architects, materials, staff, rigid timelines, permits, engineers, a structure.It works or it doesn’t.Build something that doesn’t fall down. On time.But in fact, great projects, like great careers and relationships that last, are gardens. They are tended, they shift, they grow. They endure over time, gaining a personality and reflecting their environment. When something dies or fades away, we prune, replant and grow again.Perfection and polish aren’t nearly as important as good light, good drainage and a passionate gardener.By all means, build. But don’t finish. Don’t walk away.Here we grow.

- Seth Godin

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

- Bill Gates

Rich dad said to Mike and me, I am so rich because I’ve made more financial mistakes than most people. Each time I made a mistake, I learned something new. In the business world, that something new is often called experience.

- Robert Kiyosaki

If people talk about you, being jealous, critical, and trying to make you look bad, don’t let that change you. You don’t need their approval when you have God’s approval.

- Joel Olsteen

We are not in the business of iron ore. Whatever captive iron ore sources we have, we use it to make steel.

- Lakshmi Mittal

The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

- Peter Drucker

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.

- Bill Gates

Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.

- Larry Ellison

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

My job is making money, helping other people make money. I am spending money, trying to make sure more people get rich, because you cannot spend a lot of money, right? So my job is spending money, helping others. This is a headache.

- Jack Ma

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 thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it’s very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

- Bill Gates

The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.

- Andrew Carnegie

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

- Jeff Bezos

We will invest 1.1 billion dollars in India, of which 150 million dollars would be for providing leasing and financial solutions to the company’s customers and partners.

- John Chambers

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend … if you have one.”— George Bernard Shaw, playwright (to Winston Churchill)”Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”— Churchill’s response.

- Winston Churchill

Don’t worry about failure, you only have to be right once.

- Drew Houston

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

- Elon Musk

It sounds awful, but a crisis rarely ends without blood on the floor. That’s not easy or pleasant. But sadly, it is often necessary so the company can move forward again.

- Jack Welch

No matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.

- Sheryl Sandberg

People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald’s? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly.

- Ben Horowitz

Your workforce is your most valuable asset. The knowledge and skills they have represent the fuel that drives the engine of business – and you can leverage that knowledge.

- Harvey Mackay

I’m not a politician. I only want to help relieve the suffering in communities, and I want to help people see their community in each other.

- Russell Simmons

When you stop planning and preparing . . . you stop winning.

- Zig Ziglar

Passion isn’t project-specific. It’s people-specific.

- Seth Godin

No individual may have great power without availing himself of the Master Mind.

- Napoleon Hill

When Sam feels a certain way, he is relentless. He will just wear you out. He will bring up an idea, and we’ll discuss it and then decide maybe that it’s not something we should be doing right now or ever. Fine. Case closed. But as long as he is convinced that it is the right thing, it just keep coming up week after week – until finally everybody capitulates and says, well it’s easier to do it than to keep fighting this fight. I guess it could be called management by wearing you down.

- David Glass

This presents a very curious phenomenon. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what’s critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur) will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace.

- Timothy Ferriss

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

- Dale Carnegie

I see tremendous imbalance in the world. A very uneven playing field, which has gotten tilted very badly. I consider it unstable. At the same time, I don’t exactly see what is going to reverse it.

- George Soros

Really, truly, try to figure out what your palate is all about. If you’ve determined that you don’t like dirty old stinky wine – old-world flavors – you probably like new-world fruit bombs. Stick to Shirazes and California Cabernets or Zinfandels.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Buda dijo: El odio nunca es vencido por el odio sino por el amor, y un malentendido no termina nunca gracias una discusión sino gracias al tacto, la diplomacia, la conciliación, y un sincero deseo de apreciar el punto de vista de los demás.

- Dale Carnegie

One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that good ones slip through.

- Seth Godin

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

- Bill Gates

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

- Elon Musk

My organization, my colleagues and I, are paid to run hotels in good times and fair times. We’re professionals. That’s what we do. I don’t give a damn about the short-term market implications.

- Stephen Wynn

Being productive gives people a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that loafing never can.

- Zig Ziglar

People can get information – on entertainment, politics, finance – much easier than before. That will change the way people do business, the way people live.

- Robin Li

My belief as a Christian is when we receive Christ as salvation, that that gives us a guarantee for Heaven.

- Joel Olsteen

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

You don’t make spending decisions, investment decisions, hiring decisions, or whether-you’re-going-to-look-for-a-job decisions when you don’t know what’s going to happen.

- Michael Bloomberg

I really good at simplifying things. I think that’s my main strength. Taking something that’s fairly complex down to it’s essence. That’s what I love doing. That’s what I love thinking about.

- Jack Dorsey

I move onward, the only direction Can’t be scared to fail in search of perfection.

- Jay-Z

Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.

- Howard Schultz

I always try to acknowledge what someone’s done well before talking about what could be done better. – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands

- David Novak

Chambers have numerous committees and serving on one of them provides numerous networking opportunities as well as professional leadership development.

- American Business Magazine

One of my biggest personal holdings is Rotana. That company has a very dominant force in the Middle East. It has around 45% of all the movie industry and around 75% of all the music.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

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

No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.

- Michael Bloomberg

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

Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people”, that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

- Peter Drucker

There are seldom, if ever, any hopeless situations, but there are many people who lose hope in the face of some situations.

- Zig Ziglar

Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: 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. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.

- Peter Thiel

I have the favor of God. I can do all things through Christ. I am blessed. I’m strong. I’m healthy.

- Joel Olsteen

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

- Winston Churchill

Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.

- Timothy Ferriss

This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.

- Bill Gates

The Italians live well. They have problems, like all countries, but they are well-dressed, the women are pretty.

- Francois Pinault

Stop doing things that waste time. Don’t replace time with your family or things that you need to do. I needed to put together two fantasy teams this weekend because that’s something I enjoy, but I did stop playing Nintendo Wii for hours on end.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.

- Seth Godin

The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.

- Bill Gates

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