Notable Quotables

It’s true that charisma can make a person stand out for a moment, but character sets a person apart for a lifetime.

- John C. Maxwell

One of the greatest failures to execute is the lack of follow-up. This seems so obvious, yet very few companies place as much emphasis on accountability as they do on figuring what they want to get done. Steve Reinemund, who was president of Pizza Hut when I was head of marketing there, is the best I’ve ever seen on this front. He always carried a three-by-five note card in his shirt pocket. When saw something that needed to be done, he’d pull out the card and write it down. Like everyone else who witnessed this, I quickly realized that I had better write down the same things because he’d surely be on me until they got done. Steve got results everywhere he went, whether it was as president of Pizzas Hut or Frito-Lay or chairman of PepsiCo, because he made a point of following up. People often lose track of what they’ve talked about in meetings of what they promised to do, but when you write it down, you won’t forget it.

- David Novak

Every single important thing we do is something we didn’t use to be good at, and in fact, might be something we used to fear.

- Seth Godin

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.

- Napoleon Hill

To change somebody’s behavior, change the level of respect she receives by giving her a fine reputation to live up to. Act as though the trait you are trying to influence is already one of the person’s outstanding characteristics.

- Dale Carnegie

As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what’s going on, you’re very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you’re guaranteed to fail.

- Ben Horowitz

The chef that grew up with the grandma who cooks tends to always beat the chef that went to the culinary institute. It’s in the blood.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.

- Peter Thiel

There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.

- Ray Dalio

Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production, using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.

- Timothy Ferriss

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

- Yoda

If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self-interest, you can have practically anything you go after.

- Napoleon Hill

You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.

- Jack Welch

Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books—those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock—also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world’s general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company’s scaling strategy.

- Peter Thiel

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Entrepreneurs must think in specifics with laser-like precision.

- Jack Nadel

In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done, and they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield…march straightforward.

- Winston Churchill

Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash. How’s that for incentive to be effective and efficient?

- Timothy Ferriss

I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t go and continue to use every advantage that I can to promote New York’s cause.

- Michael Bloomberg

Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.

- Sam Walton

The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

- Dale Carnegie

I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.

- Larry Page

Gain alignment every step of the way. Again, no involvement means no committment. Skip a layer and you will ultimately pay the price.

- David Novak

Humility is becoming a lost art, but it’s not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.

- Harvey Mackay

First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.

- Dale Carnegie

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

To be Jedi is to face the truth, and choose. Give off light, or darkness, Padawan. Be a candle, or the night.

- Yoda

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

- Larry Ellison

Churchill: The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labor Party): “If that had happened we should have lost the 1939 -45 war”.Churchill: No, it would have prevented that war.

- Winston Churchill

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

- Elon Musk

I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I think my story says that, when women are given the chance and the opportunity, that we can achieve a lot. We deliver.

- Sara Blakely

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

- Jay-Z

For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.

- James C. Collins

My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — everyday I’m learning something new.

- Richard Branson

The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.

- Warren Buffett

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

- Steve Jobs

The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.

- Michael Dell

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

- Peter Drucker

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet – how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

- Jeff Bezos

We survive the market volatility and political changes. We cater for the actual need of the people and keep pace with the country.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The Chinese people have always been determined to forge ahead.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I still get up fairly early around six, but I work out for an hour every morning, I read often while excercising and give myself some private team. I’ll speak with administrative my administrative assistant, Donna Hughes, who is an organizational genus on the way into the office and go through the day, so by the time I get to the office around 8:30 or 9:00 I can hit the ground running…In both my workday and my life, what I try to achieve is balance.

- David Novak

As much as you need a strong personality to build a business from scratch, you also must understand the art of delegation. I have to be good at helping people run the individual businesses, and I have to be willing to step back. The company must be set up so it can continue without me.

- Richard Branson

Gratitude is the single greatest treasure I will take with me from this experience.

- Oprah Winfrey

Building a better you is the first step to building a better America.

- Zig Ziglar

Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

- Peter Thiel

One can get anything if he is willing to help enough others get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

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

The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.

- Herb Kelleher

Keep costs low and spirits high, and the people of Southwest Airlines will keep LUV in the air.

- Herb Kelleher

Stubborn isn’t a word I would use to describe myself, pigheaded is more appropriate.

- Michael Bloomberg

The choice to have a great attitude is something that nobody or no circumstance can take from you.

- Zig Ziglar

People around the world, they want the authentic Starbucks experience.

- Howard Schultz

I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.

- Mark Zuckerberg

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them. The first month cost perhaps $200 more than if I had been micromanaging.

- Timothy Ferriss

No one has a transparent view of the world. In fact, we all carry around a personal worldview—the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world.

- Seth Godin

I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can’t truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.

- Zig Ziglar

Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.

- Peter Thiel

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

- Warren Buffett

For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.

- Joel Olsteen

Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting.

- Peter Thiel

The best way to be missed when you’re gone,Is to stand for something when you’re here.

- Seth Godin

Every sale has 5 basic obstacles: need, money, hurry, desire, trust.

- Zig Ziglar

I definitely think there’s some way to understand how people emotionally feel about somebody, but I don’t think data collects it. They’re not going to click your bit.ly link or click your TweetMeme retweet every time.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.

- Dale Carnegie

The boy you trained, gone he is. Consumed by Darth Vader.

- Yoda

Exchanging practically all the British infantry and artillery in India for Territorial batteries and battalions, and the formation of the 27th, 28th and 29th Divisions of regular troops. The New Zealand contingent must be escorted to Australia and there, with 25,000 Australians, await convoys to Europe. Meanwhile the leading troops of the Canadian Army, about 25,000 strong, had to be brought across the Atlantic. All this was of course additional to the main situation in the North Sea and to the continued flow of drafts, reinforcements and supplies across the Channel. Meanwhile the enemy’s Fleet remained intact, waiting, as we might think, its moment to strike; and his cruisers continued to prey upon the seas. To strengthen our cruiser forces we had already armed and commissioned twenty-four liners as auxiliary cruisers, and had armed defensively fifty-four merchantmen. Another forty suitable vessels were in preparation. In order to lighten the strain in the Indian Ocean and to liberate our light cruisers for their proper work of hunting down the enemy, I proposed the employment of our old battleships (Canopus class) as escorts to convoys.

- Winston Churchill

I learned this early on in the variety business: You’ve got to give folks responsibility, you’ve got to trust them, and then you’ve got to check on them.

- Sam Walton

An enterprise shall take care of the people’s livelihood, through thick and thin…

- Cheng Yu-tung

My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she’s at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn’t think it would be fair; plus, they didn’t have any interest anyway.

- Howard Schultz

In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come.

- Peter Thiel

I think it’s a problem that we don’t have more companies like Facebook. It shouldn’t be the only company that’s doing this well.

- Peter Thiel

When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.

- Larry Ellison

Mine, or I will help you not!

- Yoda

The marriage partner is not really the problem. No other person can ultimately make you happy. You must learn how to be happy within yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

If Vancouver did not succeed as Starbucks from ’87 on, our entire international business, which is now thousands of stores and a significant amount of growth and profit, may not have existed.

- Howard Schultz

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

The world’s major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

- Tadashi Yanai

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

- David Ogilvy

As long as you’re living in regret, focused on the negative things of the past, you won’t move ahead to the bright future God has in store. You need to let go of what didn’t work out. Let go of your hurts and pains. Let go of your mistakes and failures. You can’t do anything about the past, but you can do something about right now.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.

- Jack Welch

In my opinion, education is the finest gift an individual can give a young person.

- Donald Bren

When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I’d get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Like it or not, life is a series of competitions. You may be competing for a grade, a spot on a team, a job, or the largest account in town. The higher your self-esteem is, the better you get along with yourself, with others, and the more you’ll accomplish.

- Harvey Mackay

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

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