Notable Quotables

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.

- Seth Godin

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends coming in.

- John D. Rockefeller

Nevertheless, in the first years of Standard Oil, Rockefeller regularly toured his facilities and was extremely inquisitive and observant, soaking up information and assiduously quizzing plant superintendants. In his pocket, he carried a little red notebook in which he jotted suggestions or improvements and always followed up on them. He knew the terror inspired by the little red book. More than once I have gone to luncheon with a number of our heads of departments and have seen the sweat out of on the foreheads for some of them when that little red notebook was pulled out.

- Ron Chernow

Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about “let’s see” and “try.” If there’s no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated.

- Seth Godin

Life’s most soothing things are a child’s goodnight and sweet music….

- Thomas Edison

Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness – great wealth, great return, great satisfaction, great reputation, and great joy

- Jim Rohn

It’s only lonely at the top if you forget all the people you met along the way and fail to acknowledge their contributions to your success.

- Harvey Mackay

Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.

- Tadashi Yanai

Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.

- Sam Walton

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

- Elon Musk

Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You’re not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.

- Seth Godin

The typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician.

- Michael Gerber

The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.

- Peter Drucker

What I most identify with is effortless fashion, looking as if someone’s not put a lot of effort into their look.

- Sara Blakely

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

- Andrew Carnegie

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.

- Jeff Bezos

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.

- Bill Gates

The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.

- Arthur Golden

Most people have bosses who hire them to fill a slot in the work chart and to do what they are told. And most people who are doing what they are told feel safe, it feels reliable.

- Seth Godin

It’s not about size, it’s about your ability to make a difference. At that small size, collaboration is all the more important.

- John Chambers

Looking? Found someone you have, eh?

- Yoda

Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

- Dale Carnegie

To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.

- Dale Carnegie

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

- Howard Schultz

Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.

- Steve Ballmer

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

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Bill Gates

In reality it is the focus on the first three D’s that ultimately gains you the data, and the dollars you need to become very, very rich…in other words the dollars are derived from having a dream, being dedicated, and having the drive to win.

- Robert Kiyosaki

If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.

- Seth Godin

If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick Over the Beehive.

- Dale Carnegie

The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.

- Peter Thiel

The abundance mindset makes it easier to be graceful.

- Seth Godin

There’s no single company in the whole world that has a big-scale production base and at the same time has screening and distribution channels. Wanda Group is the first one in the world.

- Wang Jianlin

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

- David Novak

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

- Robert Kennedy

There is a time to provide advice and offer an opinion, and there is a time not to. Don’t be too quick to offer unsolicited advice. It certainly will not endear you to people.

- Harvey Mackay

God can cause opportunity to find you. He has unexpected blessings where you suddenly meet the right person, or suddenly your health improves, or suddenly you’re able to pay off your house. That’s God shifting things in your favor.

- Joel Olsteen

And I keep saying, whether you like the president or not, everybody has to pull together and help the president because, as the president goes, so goes the country, as the country goes, so goes your job, your ability to feed your family, your government.

- Michael Bloomberg

What we want to watch is whether this is a short-term bump or not.

- John Chambers

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

- Winston Churchill

People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.

- Peter Thiel

What’s your vision for the future of your follicles?

- Clay Clark

I have no interest in going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. I’m just not that kind of dude.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change – as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

- Bill Gates

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy, profit from folly rather than participate in it.

- Warren Buffett

I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.

- Reid Hoffman

One day a friend came by the job site and asked them separately what they were doing. The first said, Aw, we’re just laying brick. We’ve been doing this for thirty years. It’s so boring. One brick on top of the other.” Then the friend asked the second bricklayer. He just lit up. Why, we’re building a magnificent skyscraper,” he said. This structure is going to stand tall for generations to come. I’m just so excited that I could be a part of it.” Each bricklayer’s happiness or lack of it was based on their perspective. You can be laying a brick or you can be building a beautiful skyscraper. The choice is up to you. You can go to work each day and just punch in on the clock and dread being there and do as little as possible. Or you can show up with enthusiasm and give it your best, knowing that you’re making the world a better place.

- Joel Olsteen

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

I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.

- Bill Gates

Your story needs to move people’s spirits and build their goodwill, so that when you finally do ask them to buy from you, they feel like you’ve given them so much it would be almost rude to refuse.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.

- Seth Godin

Money is not the motivating force. It’s nice to have money, but I don’t live high. What I enjoy is running the business.

- Rupert Murdoch

Most of us have never felt at a disadvantage because we did not receive any inheritance. About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent.

- Thomas J Stanley

If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.

- Joel Olsteen

The Apple Stores’ sleek minimalist design and close control over the consumer experience, the omnipresent advertising campaigns, the price positioning as a maker of premium goods, and the lingering nimbus of Steve Jobs’s personal charisma all contribute to a perception that Apple offers products so good as to constitute a category of their own.

- Peter Thiel

Every breakthrough business idea begins with solving a common problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. I discovered a big one when I took apart an IBM PC. I made two interesting discoveries: The components were all manufactured by other companies, and the system that retailed for $3,000 cost about $600 in parts.

- Michael Dell

I seek constantly to improve my manners and graces, for they are the sugar to which all are attracted.

- Og Mandino

Linchpins are the essential building blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.

- Seth Godin

Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.

- Phil Knight

The Government simply cannot make up their mind or they cannot get the prime minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful for impotency. And so we go on preparing more months more years precious perhaps vital for the greatness of Britain for the locusts to eat. – Speaking in the Address in Reply debate, after giving some specific instances of Germany’s war preparedness.

- Winston Churchill

The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.

- Timothy Ferriss

Outside of your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. I don’t mean that we are to spend all our time focused on me, me, me to the exclusion of others. Instead, I mean that we must be healthy internally—emotionally and spiritually—in order to create healthy relationships with others. Motivational pep talks and techniques for achieving success are useless if a person is weighed down by guilt, shame, depression, rejection, bitterness, or crushed self-esteem. Countless marriages land on the rocks of divorce because unhealthy people marry thinking that marriage, or their spouse, will make them whole. Wrong. If you’re not a healthy single person you won’t be a healthy married person. Part of God’s purpose for every human life is wholeness and health. I love the words of Jesus in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” God knows we are the walking wounded in this world and He wants the opportunity to remove everything that limits us and heal every wound from which we suffer. Some wonder why God doesn’t just “fix” us automatically so we can get on with life. It’s because He wants our wounds to be our tutors to lead us to Him. Pain is a wonderful motivator and teacher! When the great Russian intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from the horrible Siberian work camp to which he was sent by Joseph Stalin, he said, “Thank you, prison!” It was the pain and suffering he endured that caused his eyes to be opened to the reality of the God of his childhood, to embrace his God anew in a personal way. When we are able to say thank you to the pain we have endured, we know we are ready to fulfill our purpose in life. When we resist the pain life brings us, all of our energy goes into resistance and we have none left for the pursuit of our purpose. It is the better part of wisdom to let pain do its work and shape us as it will. We will be wiser, deeper, and more productive in the long run. There is a great promise in the New Testament that says God comes to us to comfort us so we can turn around and comfort those who are hurting with the comfort we have received from Him (see 2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Make yourself available to God and to those who suffer. A large part of our own healing comes when we reach out with compassion to others.

- Zig Ziglar

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

- Peter Thiel

Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.

- Zig Ziglar

If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

- Peter Thiel

Sooner or later, many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

- Seth Godin

You can’t get too much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good.

- Jerry West

One thing I resent is the slur that I just support political candidates because of the business.

- Rupert Murdoch

The debt limits have to come down. The whole world of debt has to be changed as far as this country is concerned. We have to create jobs and we have to create them rapidly because if we don’t things are just going to head in a direction that’s going to be almost impossible to recover from.

- Donald Trump

There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices and people want to be heard.

- Rupert Murdoch

Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.

- Sam Walton

I think faith is incredibly important because you will become overwhelmed with what’s happening and you will have waves of grief, but when you turn to your faith, I believe God will give you waves of grace to get through it.”- Joel Osteen

- Joel Olsteen

I am optimistic that we can achieve a better future. It’s not true that the Philippines is a hopeless case.

- Henry Sy

The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

- Michael Bloomberg

Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

- Confucius

Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.

- Seth Godin

There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.

- Henry Ford

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

- Winston Churchill

Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

- Bill Gates

Well, clearly Apple is a role model of the American innovation whereby it produced all these products – iPod, iPhone, iPad – that are really now dominating all the technology arena in the world.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

The opportunity of a lifetime is to pick yourself. Quit waiting to get picked; quit waiting for someone to give you permission; quit waiting for someone to say you are officially qualified and pick yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, but it does mean you stand up and say, ‘I have something to say. I know how to do something. I’m doing it. If you want me to do it with you, raise your hand.

- Seth Godin

I won’t do something unless I can get at least two or three good laughs out of it. If I can’t, it’s not gonna make the team.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

- Jeff Bezos

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

- Winston Churchill

We’re working toward the ability for all Cisco devices to work together and communicate with each other to stop attacks. The idea is that one device can warn another device of a threat.

- John Chambers

The only way to solve the problem of Boko Haram is to create jobs.

- Aliko Dangote

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