Notable Quotables

If you ask me whether the future is better than today, I would say yes; but the people must be ready to pay for services and pay their taxes.

- Aliko Dangote

The typical factory-centric organization places a premium on not-wrong, and spends no time at all weeding out those who don’t start. In the networked economy, the innovation-focused organization has no choice but to obsess about those who don’t start. Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don’t start, you never get a chance.

- Seth Godin

Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn’t mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It’s about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.

- Steve Martin

[As a child] I would just question things…

- Elon Musk

I think my whole life, because of where I came from, I had a fear of failure.

- Howard Schultz

Do or do not. There is no try.

- Yoda

I think Twitter is the future of communications and Square will be the payment network.

- Jack Dorsey

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

- Robert Frost

You will either look back in life and say, I wish I had, or, I’m glad I did.

- Zig Ziglar

I believe that when you think of the negative, and you get up discouraged – ‘There’s nothing good in my future’ – I really believe it almost ties the hands of God. God works where there’s an attitude of faith. I believe faith is all about hope.

- 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

My children – in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.

- Steve Ballmer

[Less than a week after founding the forerunner to Nike] I forgot to make it part of the original agreement, but I think it ought to be made explicit: There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.

- Phil Knight

It’s not where you start or even what happens to you along the way that’s important. What is important is that you persevere and never give up on yourself.

- Zig Ziglar

When you throw dirt at people, you’re not doing a thing but losing ground.

- Zig Ziglar

Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

- Jack Nadel

We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.

- Thomas Edison

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

- Bill Gates

Failure is a great teacher, and I have been its student on more than one occasion. – CEO David Novak of Yum! Brands

- David Novak

Learning to be a CEO through classroom training would be like learning to be an NFL quarterback through classroom training.

- Ben Horowitz

There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.

- Napoleon Hill

Churchill was in the lavatory in the House of Commons and his secretary knocked on the door and said: Excuse me Prime Minister, but the Lord Privy Seal wishes to speak to you. After a pause Churchill replied: Tell His Lordship: I’m sealed on The Privy and can only deal with one shit at a time.

- Winston Churchill

We ride roughshod over the feelings of others, getting our own way, finding fault, issuing threats, criticising a child or an employee in front of others, without even considering the hurt to the other person’s pride. Whereas a few minutes’ thought, a considerate word or two, a genuine understanding of the other person’s attitude, would go so far toward alleviating the sting!

- Dale Carnegie

As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

- Peter Thiel

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful – it depends on how they’re managed.

- Ray Dalio

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

- Jack Welch

If you’re only willing to do what’s easy, life will be hard. But if you’re willing to do what’s hard, life will be easy.

- T. Harv Eker

BLAMING IDIOTS FOR interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children—they can’t help it. It’s their nature. Then again, I had (who am I kidding—and have), on occasion, been known to create interruptions out of thin air. If you’re anything like me, that makes us both occasional idiots. Learn to recognize and fight the interruption impulse. This is infinitely easier when you have a set of rules, responses, and routines to follow.

- Timothy Ferriss

This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook’s a free service. It’s free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I believe that God breathed life into every person and that every person is made in the image of God and you have accept them as they are, on their journey. I’m not here to preach hate or push people down.

- Joel Olsteen

Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.

- Peter Drucker

Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.

- Sam Walton

My mission is not to forbid French art. If the quality is there, I buy; if the quality isn’t there, I don’t.

- Francois Pinault

The response to the Starbucks brand has been phenomenal in our international markets.

- Howard Schultz

Berkshire’s record would have been terrible if Warren didn’t keep learning.

- Charlie Munger

Entrepreneurial skills and ability for sheer hard work will help Hong Kong re-orient its economy for future growth through a broad variety of strong and promising businesses.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don’t love.

- Jack Welch

You think Yoda stops teaching, just because his student does not want to hear? A teacher Yoda is. Yoda teaches like drunkards drink, like killers kill.

- Yoda

Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that everything changes except the law of change. He said: You cannot step in the same river twice. The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?

- Dale Carnegie

Try to look at your weakness and convert it into your strength. That’s success.

- Zig Ziglar

An individual artist needs only a thousand true fans in her tribe. It’s enough.

- Seth Godin

The internet population is going up and up. I am confident that this will be a huge market.

- Robin Li

I think the advantage of democracy is that it makes us less dependent on a group of leaders.

- Azim Premji

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren’t so exciting.

- Bill Gates

Sam phoned to tell me he was going to start a wholesale club. It was no surprise. He is notorious for looking at what everybody else does, taking the best of it, and then making it better.

- Sol Price

People ask me all the time, ‘How can I become a successful entrepreneur?’ And I have to be honest: It’s one of my least favorite questions, because if you’re waiting for someone else’s advice to become an entrepreneur, chances are you’re not one.

- Michael Dell

I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.

- Bill Gates

A Timid Trapeze Artist Is a Dead Trapeze Artist.

- Seth Godin

Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.

- John C. Maxwell

Even though I am nearly deaf, I seem to be gifted with a kind of inner hearing which enables me to detect sounds and noises that the listeners do not perceive.

- Thomas Edison

If you always think about your dreams or goals, work steadfastly towards them and continue to challenge yourself, you will definitely be able to realise those dreams or goals.

- Tadashi Yanai

With tech companies, whoever’s the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, ‘Is this the end of them?’ And – there’s more – more times people think that’s the case than it really is the case.

- Bill Gates

Learn to speak God’s favor over every area of your life. Remember, the more favor-minded you are, the more of God’s favor you’re going to experience.

- Joel Olsteen

Relationships are leverage. If you give value to someone else first, you have leverage.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

- Peter Drucker

Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.

- Seth Godin

Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others…He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds – or on persons devoted to them – have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a ‘dirty little atheist’ he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with ‘The Rights of Man’ he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But ‘The Age of Reason’ cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen – a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad.The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty – who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause – can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.

- Thomas Edison

Who am I winning for? Am I winning for Oracle shareholders or is it simply a matter of personal vanity? I’ll admit to it. Mea culpa. An awful lot of it is personal vanity.

- Larry Ellison

In our day Capital, Business Ability, and Manual Labor are the legs of a three-legged stool. While the three legs stand sound and firm, the stool stands; but let any one of the three weaken and break, let it be pulled out or struck out, down goes the stool to the ground. And the stool is of no use until the third leg is restored.

- Andrew Carnegie

I do not believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process

- Oprah Winfrey

Earl Nightingale has inspired more people toward success and fortune than any other motivational speaker on the planet.

- Zig Ziglar

You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.

- Peter Thiel

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

One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.

- Seth Godin

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

- Steve Wozniak

[On the cost to found Nike] Six hundred dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars total investment.

- Phil Knight

No question about it, alot of my attitude towards money stems from growing up during a pretty hardscrabble time in our country’s history: the Great Depression.

- Sam Walton

We appreciate size, but only if it is robust growth. Just to be big is not a target.

- Alexei Mordashov

Let me remind everyone in this room that we are not changing guidance.

- John Chambers

I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.

- Elon Musk

My first job. Ah, the memories. I’m hired for minimum wage as the cleaner at an ice cream parlor and quickly realize that the big boss’s methods duplicate effort. I do it my way, finish in one hour instead of eight, and spend the rest of the time reading kung-fu magazines and practicing karate kicks outside. I am fired in a record three days, left with the parting comment, Maybe someday you’ll understand the value of hard work.” It seems I still don’t.

- Timothy Ferriss

The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo, the job is to invent the status quo.

- Seth Godin

I heard about this man who fell into a pit, and while he was down there several people came by and offered their opinions. The Pharisee said, You deserve to be in the pit.” The Catholic said, You need to suffer while you’re in the pit.” The Baptist said, If you’d been saved, you wouldn’t have fallen into the pit.” The charismatic said, Just confess I’m not in the pit.” The mathematician said, Let me calculate how you fell into the pit.” The IRS agent said, Have you paid taxes on that pit?” The optimist said, Things could be worse.” The pessimist said, Things will get worse.

- Joel Olsteen

This is like the Six Sigma approach to quality. Six Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units. The problem is that once you’re heading down this road, there’s no room left for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. Either you rolled ten strikes or you didn’t. Organizations that earn dramatic success always do it in markets where asymptotes don’t exist, or where they can be shattered. If you could figure out how to bowl 320, that would be amazing. Until that happens, pick a different sport if you want to be a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

I will study and prepare myself, and someday the opportunity will come.

- Abraham Lincoln

Our lives change in two ways :through the people we meet and the books we read.

- Harvey Mackay

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

- Thomas Edison

You’re never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

- Bill Gates

The warrior mentality, the very fight to survive, is truly what created our culture.

- Herb Kelleher

1. What is our mission?2. Who is our customer?3. What does the customer value?4. What are our results?5. What is our plan?

- Peter Drucker

Not victory , Obi- Wan. The shroud of the Dark Side has fallen. Begun, this Clone War has.

- Yoda

There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.

- Phil Knight

Having a personality of caring about people is important. You cant be a good leader unless you generally like people. That is how you bring out the best in them.

- Richard Branson

Too often we judge people based on our own backgrounds and experiences, but when you understand people’s stories, it’s easier to understand their demeanor.

- Joel Olsteen

My father left me with a clear sense that the media was something different.

- Rupert Murdoch

I read Google News and use NetNewsWire to keep up with general and tech news.

- Steve Wozniak

Inflation is taking up the poverty line, and poverty is not just economic but defined by way of health and education.

- Azim Premji

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 relationships we have with people are extremely important to success on and off the job.

- Zig Ziglar

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