I think the most important thing that I think everyone in America must have is belief that wherever they live, whatever station they have in life, that the American dream is alive and well. I think the fracturing of trust and confidence is in the American dream.
- Howard Schultz
Notable Quotables
The safest plan, and the one most sure of success for the young man starting in life, is to select the vocation which is most congenial to his tastes.
- P.T. Barnum
The cost of praising someone is nil – but every psychological study shows the payoff is huge.
- Harvey Mackay
There would be no advantage to be gained by sowing a field of wheat if the harvest did not return more than was sown.
- Napoleon Hill
Would you believe that in 2011 and 2012, Nigeria paid $30 billion in subsidy, money which would have been used to build at least 20 refineries?
- Aliko Dangote
You must find something that you deeply love and are passionate about and are willing to sacrifice a lot to achieve.
- Howard Schultz
The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your losses.
- Dale Carnegie
Do you know what that word reign means? It means, time in power.” God said we’re to reign how long? In life. That means as long as you’re alive that is your time in power.
- Joel Olsteen
Artists don’t think outside the box, because outside the box there’s a vacumm. Outside the box there are no rules, there is no reality. You have nothing to interact with, nothing to work against. If you set out to do something way outside the box (designing a time machine, or using liquid nitrogen to freeze Niagara Falls), then you’ll never be able to do the real work of art. You can’t ship if you’re far outside the box. Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done. That’s where the audience is, that’s where the means of production are available, and that’s where you can make impact.
- Seth Godin
There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
- Sam Walton
Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.
- John C. Maxwell
Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.
- Dale Carnegie
In war and policy one should always try to put oneself in the position of what Bismarck called “the Other Man”. The more fully and sympathetically a Minister can do this the better are his chances of being right. The more knowledge he possesses of the opposite point of view, the less puzzling it is to know what to do. But imagination without deep and full knowledge is a snare.
- Winston Churchill
A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.
- Harvey Mackay
Being an artist isn’t a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It’s an attitude we can all adopt. It’s a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map. If you do those things, you’re an artist.
- Seth Godin
Any area of achievement in your life required you to stick with the basics until you became great…it’s not about learning 4,000 moves but about doing just a handful of moves 4,000 times.
- Chet Holmes
I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.
- Warren Buffett
I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.
- Elon Musk
An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
- Peter Thiel
Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it’s the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.
- Peter Thiel
Selling is the highest paid profession in the world. Our leaders in business, politics, research and the arts are all great sales people or they have great sales people on their payrolls.
- Jerry Vass
What’s also missing is a sense of relationship. People suffer in isolation from one another. In a world without purpose, without meaningful values, what have we to share but our emptiness, the needy fragments of our superficial selves? As a result, most of us scramble about hungrily seeking distraction, in music, in television, in people, in drugs. And most of all we seek things. Things to wear and things to do. Things to fill the emptiness. Things to shore up our eroding sense of self. Things to which we can attach meaning, significance, life. We’ve fast become a world of things. And most people are being buried in the profusion. What most people need, then, is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning. A place in which being human is a prerequisite, but acting human is essential. A place where the generally disorganized thinking that pervades our culture becomes organized and clearly focused on a specific worthwhile result. A place where discipline and will become prized for what they are: the backbone of enterprise and action, of being what you are intentionally instead of accidentally. A place that replaces the home most of us have lost. That’s what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing.
- Michael Gerber
I’m not a macroeconomics person.
- Bill Gates
Great foresight is required to run a multinational corporation. A magnificent blueprint, a loyal team and a well-coordinated organization are the three indispensable factors, and the same applies from ruling a country to maintaining a family.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Profitability is a shallow goal if it doesn’t have a real purpose, and the purpose has to be share the profits with others.
- Howard Schultz
Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.
- Peter Drucker
The Dip creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.
- Seth Godin
Good habits are as addictive as bad habits, and a lot more rewarding.
- Harvey Mackay
People who couldn’t fit into this informal and entreprenual environment left or were asked to leave. I cut my losses quickly on bad hires that didn’t perform.
- Jack Welch
If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary’s. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.
- Michael Bloomberg
How you get up in the morning will play a big part in how high you go up in life.
- Zig Ziglar
A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.
- Elon Musk
Wouldn’t it be great to be gifted? In fact… It turns out that choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You’re not born this way, you get this way.”
- Seth Godin
Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.
- Napoleon Hill
You can literally force yourself to be courteous, happy and enthusiastic with every person you meet. After you have forced yourself to be so for a short period of time… the habit takes over.
- Zig Ziglar
Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
- Jeff Bezos
Artists, actors, people like that, they live in a very strange bubble of their own. They’re mollycoddled; they’re highly privileged.
- Stephen Wynn
People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.
- Jerry Seinfeld
It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, an Inner Temple lawyer, now become a seditious fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.
- Winston Churchill
We think that athletes are human beings and have foibles just like human beings do…
- Phil Knight
the expression one wears on one’s face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one’s back
- Dale Carnegie
Power should be reserved for weightlifting and boats, and leadership really involves responsibility.
- Herb Kelleher
The lower and individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential.
- John Maxwell
Don’t be cocky. Don’t be flashy. There’s always someone better than you.
- Tony Hsieh
One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.
- Dale Carnegie
There are not many companies in China that dare to say in public, ‘We don’t offer bribes’, or companies that operate only by market rules.
- Wang Jianlin
Comedy may be big business but it isn’t pretty.
- Steve Martin
Any colour – so long as it’s black.
- Henry Ford
You can be happy where you are.
- Joel Olsteen
Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes – and most fools do – but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one’s mistakes.
- Dale Carnegie
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
- Peter Drucker
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.
- Yoda
I’m very, very bullish about our prospects, and as I tell our board, as I tell our employees, this is the time to invest. There’s so much opportunity. Let’s just invest in that opportunity, and really get after it.
- Steve Ballmer
Every choice you make has an end result.
- Zig Ziglar
Life isn’t fair. It’s true, and you still have to deal with it. Whining about it rarely levels the playing field, but learning to rise above it is the ultimate reward.
- Harvey Mackay
This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
- Peter Drucker
Foreplay, cuddling – a Jedi craves not these things.
- Yoda
I do think a founder has special permission to make sweeping changes across an organization.
- Michael Dell
We can’t wait for Washington. Business leaders are going to have to galvanize their own constituencies and do everything they can to demonstrate confidence in the economy, and I think that can be contagious.
- Howard Schultz
When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.
- Walt Disney
E – Edge, ability to make tough yes and no decisions
- Jack Welch
Get the facts.
- David Novak
It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.
- Bill Gates
Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best.
- John C. Maxwell
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
In general, the apparel industry isn’t about continual process improvement or making the perfect piece of denim; it’s about chasing trends.
- Tadashi Yanai
Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.
- Bill Gates
Treasure the love you receive above all. It will survive long after your good health has vanished.
- Og Mandino
The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers
- Sam Walton
To me, failure means not trying; failure isnt the outcome. If i have to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I didnt try that because I was scared,’ that is failure.
- Sara Blakely
The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.
- Peter Thiel
The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitable of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.
- Timothy Ferriss
My belief as a Christian is when we receive Christ as salvation, that that gives us a guarantee for Heaven.
- Joel Olsteen
You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.
- Winston Churchill
Relaxation and Recreation The most relaxing recreating forces are a healthy religion, sleep, music, and laughter. Have faith in God—learn to sleep well— Love good music—see the funny side of life— And health and happiness will be yours.
- Dale Carnegie
Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.
- John C. Maxwell
Not victory , Obi- Wan. The shroud of the Dark Side has fallen. Begun, this Clone War has.
- Yoda
If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.
- Jeff Bezos
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
The bottom line is that you only have the rights you fight for.
- Timothy Ferriss
The Secret Make up your mind that no matter what comes your way, no matter how difficult, no matter how unfair, you will do more than simply survive. You will thrive in spite of it.
- Joel Olsteen
The constraint of 140 characters is easy to approach and consume, without a great deal of barriers to entry. One message and suddenly the whole world has access to that Tweet.
- Jack Dorsey
Everybody was writing about computers and electronics, but all I really knew about was running. It’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life.
- Phil Knight
When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes me remember why so many business fail. Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They’re playing the sprint. They’re not worried about lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.
- Bill Gates
If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.
- Zig Ziglar
Be happy with who God made you to be, and quit wishing you were something different.
- Joel Olsteen
Of this I am quite sure. If we open up a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
- Winston Churchill
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I’ve got to confess I’m a pragmatic optimist myself.
- Zig Ziglar
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.
- Peter Drucker
If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.
- Zig Ziglar
You can take from every experience what it has to offer you. And you cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed by another.
- Oprah Winfrey
One of the main reasons that we lose our enthusiasm in life is because we become ungrateful..we let what was once a miracle become common to us. We get so accustomed to his goodness it becomes a routine..
- Joel Olsteen
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
- Richard Branson
I run a bunch of charities and I say this line to people: ‘I am somebody who has always been helped.’ A little thing like that can make people believe it.
- Russell Simmons
Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.
- Zig Ziglar
The typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician.
- Michael Gerber
Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP.
- Peter Thiel
