Notable Quotables

To answer power with power, the Jedi way this is not. In this war, a danger there is, of losing who we are.

- Yoda

When I was 12 years old, I got interested in learning English.

- Jack Ma

For the first time in a very long time, I believe the external factors are slowly starting to be more positive, … This is still a minority view, held by a minority of our customers, but we’ve seen early indications that the recovery could be gaining momentum.

- John Chambers

We modeled our employee stock ownership plan after Sam’s, and it worked well for us.

- Bernie Marcus

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

Even though people are under economic pressure, they still want to support those brands with values that are compatible with their own.

- Howard Schultz

After assessing the prospects of the various business segments of Henderson Cyber, the company, Henderson Investment, Hong Kong and China Gas and Henderson Cyber jointly announced in August 2005, the proposed privatisation of Henderson Cyber by Henderson Investment and Hong Kong and China Gas…

- Lee Shau Kee

For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.

- Steve Wozniak

At its zenith Sears accounted for more than 2 percent of all retail sales in the United States. It pioneered several innovations critical to the success of today’s most admired retailers: for example, supply chain management, store brands, catalogue retailing, and credit card sales. The esteem in which Sears’ management was held shows in this 1964 excerpt from Fortune: “How did Sears do it? In a way, the most arresting aspect of its story is that there was no gimmick. Sears opened no big bag of tricks, shot off no skyrockets. Instead, it looked as though everybody in its organization simply did the right thing, easily and naturally. And their cumulative effect was to create an extraordinary powerhouse of a company.

- Clayton M. Christensen

Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.

- Benjamin Franklin

All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.

- Donald Trump

I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.

- Bill Gates

Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.

- Marilyn vos Savant

If I was a businessman, or saw myself as a businessman, I would have never gone into the airline business.

- Richard Branson

There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.

- Bill Gates

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.

- David Packard

You will find only what you bring in.

- Yoda

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

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

- Donald Bren

Art is a way to express yourself and through that you can escape a bad situation.

- Russell Simmons

I am an expert in Higher Level Math. You + God= Enough

- Zig Ziglar

As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Wal-Mart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy – the landlord’s son – out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet. Quite a few smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart’s growth. Some people have tried to turn it into this big controversy, sort of a Save the Small-Town Merchants deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes of something that has the right to be protected…If you become a large-scale success it’s Katie bar the door. Suddenly, you make a very convenient villian because everybody seems to love shooting at who’s on top.

- Sam Walton

Concentration is my motto – first honesty, then industry, then concentration.

- Andrew Carnegie

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

- Thomas Edison

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.

- Reed Hastings

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, ‘What’s in it for me?

- Brian Tracy

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

- Oprah Winfrey

If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth

- Ray Kroc

The three Rs in educationare reading, writing and arithmetic. Without these basic skills, learning becomes almost impossible. In a similar way, business starts with a relationship. You are then judged by the results. Rewards spring from the results.

- Jack Nadel

It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.

- Robert Kiyosaki

The more you talk about negative things in your life, the more you call them in. Speak victory not defeat.

- Joel Olsteen

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

- Thomas Edison

Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.

- W. Clement Stone

When you supervise something, it is one thing. When you are in the middle of something, there is a different pace of life.

- Vladimir Potanin

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.

- Thomas Edison

The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked.

- Napoleon Hill

That’s one of our biggest challenges – getting the people to the product immediately in a consistent way.

- Jack Dorsey

The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitable of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

- Timothy Ferriss

Given the uncertainty going into the Y2K quarter, we are very pleased with our quarterly results.

- John Chambers

When you focus on being a blessing, God makes sure that you are always blessed in abundance.

- Joel Olsteen

Japanese tend to put sales and market share first. They make many products with the aim of raising sales. But then profits decline, and companies find themselves falling into debt… I changed the mindset at Canon by getting people to realize that profits come first.

- Fujio Mitarai

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

- Steve Jobs

How you look, talk, and market your business is what should be keeping everyone busy.

- Bryan Smith

Don’t sling mud at others or soon you will find yourself in a deeper hole than when you started.

- Clay Clark

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

all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.

- Timothy Ferriss

We hate bureaucracy and all the nonsense that comes with it.

- Jack Welch

Every leader’s potential is determined by the people closest to him. No matter what I did with that staff, they would never be able to take the organization to the place we needed to go.

- Napoleon Hill

I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family that would have killed for each other – and we still are. x

- Richard Branson

All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current.

- Ben Horowitz

In the end, I hope there’s a little note somewhere that says I designed a good computer.

- Steve Wozniak

We must … balance the fact that innovation inside the network is just as important as innovation in services and devices connected to the Internet. Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to engage in pro-competitive network management techniques to alleviate congestion, ameliorate capacity constraints, and enable new services.

- John Chambers

Most good ideas are already out there, and to learn about them, all you have to do is ask the right people.

- David Novak

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

- Bill Gates

But I believe in fair trade, and I will tell you, I have many, many friends heading up corporations, and people that do just business in China, they say it’s virtually impossible. It’s very, very hard to come into China. And yet, we welcome them with open arms.

- Donald Trump

If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.

- Elon Musk

[In June 2011] I mean, what is Twitter? Ask 100 people, ‘what is the world?’ and you’ll get a thousand different answers. The same is true for Twitter. It’s different things to different people. Twitter is the world.

- Jack Dorsey

That was annoying but not entirely unexpected. It’s not a huge shock, given what’s going on down there.

- Ed Clark

Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It’s really a great invention and I wouldn’t under-estimate the value of that, but they’re not designed to take care of social needs.

- George Soros

I’d never worked in fashion or retail. I just needed an undergarment that didn’t exist.

- Sara Blakely

I feel good about being able to take bluegrass on to television like ‘Letterman’ and ‘The View,’ and I’ve heard nice things about being able to do that. I really haven’t felt any negativity toward me or my music.

- Steve Martin

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

- Jay-Z

Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.

- Bill Gates

When I first discovered in the early 1980s the Italian espresso bars in my trip to Italy, the vision was to re-create that for America – a third place that had not existed before. Starbucks re-created that in America in our own image; a place to go other than home or work. We also created an industry that did not exist: specialty coffee.

- Howard Schultz

Direct your energy toward achieving a goal, and tackle the problems with an emphasis on edging closer to a successful result.

- Harvey Mackay

When you own your choices, you own their consequences.

- Jack Welch

This book, then, is a product of the last fifteen years, as well as a product of the fifteen years that preceded them. It was almost exactly eight years before The E-Myth was published that I founded our company, E-Myth Worldwide, which has provided the fuel and experience for the point of view I have shared with those of you who have read The E-Myth, and with those.

- Michael Gerber

Look back in forgiveness, forward in hope, down in compassion, and up with gratitude.

- Zig Ziglar

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

- Winston Churchill

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

- Winston Churchill

Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.

- Donald Trump

The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.

- John C. Maxwell

Excepting for reading my numbers on Saturday morning and going to our regular meetings, I don’t have much of a routine for anything else. I always carry my little tape recorder on trips, to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.

- Sam Walton

Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We’ll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and attract great people into the company. I’m very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish.

- Steve Ballmer

In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.

- Bill Gates

I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.

- Walt Disney

Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.

- Peter Thiel

There is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.

- Winston Churchill

Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.

- Elon Musk

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

One of the things that I’m really proud of is that I have really good timing. It’s very easy for me to see what’s coming up and it’s no coincidence that I went headfirst into wine and then headfirst into new media – none at all.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that’s fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.

- Bryan Adams

Where did your art go while you were tweeting?

- Seth Godin

The sooner you accept the fact that you will have both successes and failures, the easier it will be to get your business and personal life headed in the right direction.

- Harvey Mackay

Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.

- Phil Knight

Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.

- Seth Godin

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