The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.
- Bill Gates
Notable Quotables
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.
- Jack Welch
I never took classic business classes in college, so I don’t have the background that any of the people running large companies have.
- Howard Schultz
People ask me what’s the most important function when you’re starting an organization or setting up the kind of culture and values that are going to endure. The discipline I believe so strongly in is H.R., and its the last discipline that gets funded.
- Howard Schultz
Revolution has values, revolution has purpose. Revolution has direction. Revolution has leaders. Revolution looks at the intersection ahead and pushes people to do the right thing. And it doesn’t always have to be loud. It doesn’t always have to be violent. It’s just as powerful in it’s stillness.
- Jack Dorsey
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
- David Novak
Bill Campbell developed an excellent methodology for measuring executives in a balanced way that will help you achieve this. He breaks performance down into four distinct areas.
- Ben Horowitz
We will as ever continue to pursue growth opportunities that will further enhance our ability to capitalize on the investment opportunities and to face the challenges ahead.
- Cheng Yu-tung
If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.
- Elon Musk
The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.
- Peter Drucker
Whether changes happen depends on people’s mind and view.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I got a call from the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah had chosen Spanx as one of her favorite products in 2000. I had boxes of product in my apartment and I had two weeks notice that she was going to say she loved it on TV and I had no shipping department.
- Sara Blakely
Get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off of the bus.
- Jim Collins
Leadership must wake up every day with the mission of Finding a Better Way Every Day…There are no modest revolutions…GE was a place where the people got up everyday to searching for a better way.
- Jack Welch
Let us work together to take Hong Kong to new heights.
- Cheng Yu-tung
We subpoenaed him for the SAP trial and he was on the lam. The HP board sent him to Bolivia to talk to customers. Then they sent him to Mongolia to talk to customers, just out of reach of the federal subpoenas … the board figured out [later]: we should have left Leo in Mongolia.
- Larry Ellison
Luck plays a role in business but whether you succeed or fail depends on many other factors. I haven’t really had a failure.
- Lui Che Woo
Group projects are the exception in school, but they should be the norm.
- Seth Godin
The U.S., especially Hollywood, is so strong for film production.
- Wang Jianlin
When you have got a thing where you want, it is a good thing to leave it where it is.
- Winston Churchill
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas, but the image is that they all come from the top. I’m afraid that’s not quite right.
- Bill Gates
Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.
- Winston Churchill
We have little choice but to move beyond quality and seek remarkable, connected, and new. Remarkable, as you’ve already figured out, demands initiative.
- Seth Godin
We have a very high churn rate, but as soon as we turn on email marketing to our user base, people will come back.” Yes, of course. The reason that people leave our service and don’t come back is that we have not been sending them enough spam. That makes total sense to me, too.
- Ben Horowitz
I think a big test we all face in life on a regular basis is that discouragement test. Life’s not always fair, but I believe if you keep doing the right thing, God will get you to where you are.
- Joel Olsteen
There’s a way to do it better – find it.
- Thomas Edison
Never surrender opportunity for security.
- Branch Rickey
Young people, when they’re left alone, always want to have compassion, and they always want to give. They always want to help people who are less fortunate.
- Russell Simmons
the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.
- Dale Carnegie
If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth
- Ray Kroc
How do you tap in to what God has already done? Very simple: just act like you’re blessed, talk like you’re blessed, walk like you’re blessed, think like you’re blessed, smile like you’re blessed, dress like you’re blessed. Put actions behind your faith, and one day you will see it become a reality.
- Joel Olsteen
The smartest business decision you can make is to hire qualified people. Bringing the right people on board saves you thousands, and your business will run smoothly and efficiently.
- Brian Tracy
If the United States wants access to Chinese, Indian or Vietnamese markets, we must get access to theirs. U.S. protectionism is very subtle but it is very much there.
- Azim Premji
I grew up in a house where my father encouraged my brother and me to fail. I specifically remember coming home and saying, ‘Dad, Dad, I tried out for this or that and I was horrible,’ and he would high-five me and say, ‘Way to go.’
- Sara Blakely
If I am gone tommorrow am I happy with my life?
- Stacy Thorn
I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.
- Joel Olsteen
In the world of education, the more mistakes a person makes, the less intelligent that person is thought to be. In the world of entrepreneurship, mistakes are opportunities to learn something new, something not known previously. In the world of entrepreneurship, the more mistakes a person makes, the more a person learns. There is a bit of magic in every mistakes, so when you make mistakes, take the time to learn from them, and you’ll have more magic in your life.
- Robert Kiyosaki
All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths.
- Napoleon Hill
The more we share what’s happening around us, the more we understand how someone lives their life. The greater the understanding we have, the more empathy we have for each other. By and large, that reduces conflicts.
- Jack Dorsey
The bottom line is that you only have the rights you fight for.
- Timothy Ferriss
What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away.
- Jack Dorsey
If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.
- Bill Gates
Lack of a well-defined purpose in life.
- Napoleon Hill
What goes on in Europe concerns us greatly because, if Europe comes apart, the E.U. comes apart, then you’re going to have enormous impact on America, that’s a very big trading partner of ours, and people own securities around the world in this day and age.
- Michael Bloomberg
Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better.
- Peter Thiel
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.
- Mark Zuckerberg
As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t.
- Ben Horowitz
Capitalism works.
- Michael Bloomberg
Our economy now rewards artists far more than any other economy in history ever has.
- Seth Godin
Unleash the power of people. No involvement means no committment.
- David Novak
Those people behind the mosque have to respect, have to appreciate and have to defer to the people of New York. The wound is still there. Just because the wound is healing you can’t say, ‘Let’s just go back to where we were pre-9/11.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
The courage take tough yes-or-no decisions. Look, the world is filled with gray. Anyone can look at an issue from every different angle. Some smart people can –and will-analyze those angles indefinitely. But effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information.
- Jack Welch
Once a decision is made…problems have to be solved.
- Theodore Roosevelt
Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It’s basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it’s wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.
- Bill Gates
I didn’t invent the hamburger. I just took it more seriously than anyone else…We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
- Ray Kroc
The best teacher is very interactive.
- Bill Gates
Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.
- Jerry Seinfeld
You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
- Bill Cosby
California, in a sense, is almost Starbucks’ largest country, with almost 3,000 stores
- Howard Schultz
Children astound me with their inquisitive minds. The world is wide and mysterious to them, and as they piece together the puzzle of life, they ask ‘Why?’ ceaselessly.
- John C. Maxwell
When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.
- Walt Disney
It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.
- Alisher Usmanov
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
- Steve Wozniak
A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
- Peter Drucker
Networking is one of the most valuable uses of your time in terms of return—and not just in monetary terms.
- Business Insider.com
The student who elects to risk it all—which is nothing—to establish an online video rental service that delivers $5,000 per month in income from a small niche of Blu-ray aficionados, a two-hour-per-week side project that allows him to work full-time as an animal rights lobbyist.
- Timothy Ferriss
He possessed a sense of calling in both religion and business, with Christianity and capitalism forming the twin pillars of his life.
- Ron Chernow
While we remain cautious about the implications of a brief pause in the current 10-year expansion of the U.S. economy, we believe that Cisco has never been better positioned to help our customers solve their two most important business issues: Increasing productivity and creating new sources of revenue.
- John Chambers
God can do what humanoids cannot.
- Clay Clark
I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.
- Bill Gates
Building a better you is the first step to building a better America.
- Zig Ziglar
In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history.
- Michael Dell
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.
- Bill Gates
Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.
- Ben Horowitz
We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.
- Bill Gates
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
- Ray Kroc
You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.
- Jerry Seinfeld
If you are satisfied with the results you are now getting, why change? If you are not satisfied, why not experiment?
- Dale Carnegie
Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
- Peter Thiel
By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
It’s about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it’s Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it’s going to be, ‘Storyteller.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If one dream dies, dream another dream. If you get knocked down, get back up and go again.
- Joel Olsteen
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
I think of L.A. as truly the melting pot. It’s basically a mini-country unto itself.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
One piece of advice that always stuck in my mind is that people should be respected and trusted as people, not because of their position or title.
- Herb Kelleher
If your watch is slow by just four minutes, that’s not much – unless you’ve been warned that if you’re even one minute late ever again you will be fired. Then four minutes make a big difference.
- Zig Ziglar
Failure to deliver on committments is, in the end, unacceptable.
- Jack Welch
When you have a dream that you can’t let go of, trust your instincts and pursue it. But remember: Real dreams take work, They take patience, and sometimes they require you to dig down very deep. Be sure you’re willing to do that.
- Harvey Mackay
Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining – it bores everybody else, does you no good, and doesn’t solve any problems.
- Zig Ziglar
The slower growth in revenues and continued pressure on margins will result in negative earnings comparison for at least the next two quarters, with fiscal 1998 earnings per share likely to be in the 2 to 2.15 range.
- Phil Knight
Well I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.
- Richard Branson
Interestingly, self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires. Also, three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs.
- The Millionaire Next Door
Anatomy of a MovementSenator Bill Bradley defines a movement as having three elements: (1) A narrative that tells a story about who we are and the future we’re trying to build. (2) A connection between and among the leader and the tribe. (3) Something to do – the fewer limits the better. Too often organizations fail to do anything but the third.
- Seth Godin
Blind we are, if creation of this clone army we could not see.
- Yoda
I don’t want to kill ads. I think advertising is great, and I’m very aware that there’s multiple revenue streams in television, subscription and advertising. But I also don’t want to put my head in the sand, and I think the world is changing.
- Charles Ergen
Chinese consumption, particularly high-end consumption, is booming.
- Wang Jianlin
Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.
- Jim Collins
