I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.
- Bill Gates
Notable Quotables
The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing because you think you can only do a little.
- Zig Ziglar
The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.
- Seth Godin
Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX.
- Peter Thiel
Shaw once remarked: If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
- Dale Carnegie
Google’s motto—“Don’t be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it’s also characteristic of a kind of business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence.
- Peter Thiel
The most impressive person I’ve ever met? Elaine Wynn is no slouch. She’s a much better person than me. But I’ve got her. Finders keepers, losers weepers. And it’s been forty-seven years.
- Stephen Wynn
New World Group believes that the desire to change and surmount the status quo will be the key to advancement and progression.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble…We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.
- Warren Buffett
China has set its cultural industries as pillar industries.
- Wang Jianlin
I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.
- Oprah Winfrey
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
- Thomas Edison
Culture is one of the most precious things a company has…So you must work harder on it than anything else.
- Herb Kelleher
God always wants us to be growing.
- Joel Olsteen
If you don’t plan your time, someone else will help you waste it.
- Zig Ziglar
Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.
- Peter Thiel
Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.
- Napoleon Hill
Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP.
- Peter Thiel
The IRS! They’re like the Mafia, they can take anything they want!
- Jerry Seinfeld
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I actually do think you’re seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that’s a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what’s going on with them.
- Mark Zuckerberg
I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.
- Richard Branson
I will not allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure.
- Og Mandino
When I hire someone, I try to get beneath the surface and go deep. The first question I ask is, Has this person demonstrated any leadership potential? I ask for specifics and probe carefully to find out exactly what that person contributed. After all, success has many fathers.’ I also look for enthusiasm, people who lean forward in their chairs, who get up on their haunches a little but when they talk about what they’ve done. I like to see the passion and the excitement because that’s what will allow someone to inspire others. The next thing I look for is an avid learners, someone who is curious, who has an ability to make connections, to pick up on trends, and to apply what’s going on in the rest of the world to his or her business career. You obviously need smart people with a proven track record, but the real stars are passionate about what they do and are avid learners. Those two things make people continually raise the bar on performance.
- David Novak
There is always plenty of capital for those who can create practical plans for using it.
- Napoleon Hill
I am someone who tweets about what I have for breakfast, what I have for lunch, what I have for dinner, and for 99.99999 percent of the world, it’s useless. It’s meaningless. But for my mother, she loves it.
- Jack Dorsey
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
Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.
- Peter Drucker
If you think your people are negative, then you had better check your attitude. Who you are is who you attract. This is the LAW of Magnetism.
- John Maxwell
I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
- Stephen R. Covey
Things get much easier if one jumps on the bandwagon of existing trends.
- Lei Jun
What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 million years. It’s about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it’s something that people have wanted forever.
- Seth Godin
If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.
- Warren Buffett
I once asked General Eisenhower’s son, John, if his father ever nourished resentments. No,” he replied, Dad never wastes a minute thinking about people he doesn’t like.
- Dale Carnegie
I have always believed that if we do well, we must also do something to help others in society.
- Henry Sy
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
The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.
- Ma Huateng
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
- Aristotle
Search engine optimization is essentially about obtaining admission to an event in which you are competing. Getting invited to compete in the event has no bearing on how you do within the competition itself, but you don’t get to play in the game unless you are on Page 1 of Google search results.
- Clay Clark
I thought of a remark . . . that the United States is like a ‘gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’ Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.
- Winston Churchill
I don’t want to be liked. I want to be respected.
- Jack Ma
Successful storytelling builds brand equity, and businesses with high brand equity don’t need to draw as much attention to themselves and their achievements as those that are still establishing their value to the customer.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
We are in the process of creating a group that has a broader business mix, better quality income streams and a stronger balance sheet. In doing so, our risk profile is spread out and we can better explore the growth potential across our five core businesses – property, hotels, infrastructure, services and telecommunications.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I… had no need for cheering dreams,” he wrote. Facts are better than dreams.
- James C. Collins
The higher the level of leadership people want to reach, the greater the sacrifices they will have to make?
- John Maxwell
The rumours of the demise of the U.S. manufacturing industry are greatly exaggerated.
- Elon Musk
So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.
- Reed Hastings
My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.
- P.T. Barnum
There are two types of people in the world. One type is known as leaders and the other as followers. Decide at the outset whether you intend to become a leader in your chose calling or remain a follower. The difference in compensation is vast. The follwer cannot reasonably expect the compensation to which a leader is entitled, although many followers make the mistake of expecting such pay.
- Napoleon Hill
In every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear.
- Seth Godin
You’ve got to embrace what you don’t know.
- Sara Blakely
Service is the key to everything in life.
- Russell Simmons
The Group will be able to capture opportunities arising from the growth and integration of the two economies, and scale new heights in the years ahead.
- Cheng Yu-tung
10% of Americans hold 73% of the country’s wealth.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I’m on the Facebook board now. Little did they know that I thought Facebook was really stupid when I first heard about it back in 2005.
- Reed Hastings
It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter—nothing can justify that sacrifice.
- Timothy Ferriss
I believe that greatest things happen only when you give others the credit. That’s the law of EMPOWERMENT in action.
- Napoleon Hill
It seems like a good cause. I’ve been watching it on TV and, it makes me want to help.
- Ed Clark
Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge….
- Thomas Edison
Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.
- Bill Gates
This is just going to be a great event and we have an outstanding speaker.
- Jack Taylor
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
- Mahatma Gandhi
The world of the 1990s and beyond will not belong to ‘managers’ or those who can make the numbers dance. The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders – people who not only have enormous amounts of energy but who can energize those whom they lead.
- Jack Welch
A blow that would kill a civilized man soon heals on a savage. The higher we go in the scale of life, the greater is the capacity for suffering.
- Dale Carnegie
When we are not engaged in thinking about some definite problem, we usually spend about 95 percent of our time thinking about ourselves.
- Dale Carnegie
There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.
- Phil Knight
True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.
- Zig Ziglar
Philanthropy should be voluntary.
- Bill Gates
A remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers and warmed and cheered all our hearts.
- Winston Churchill
The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.
- Bill Gates
Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.
- Peter Drucker
We know that if you just were to take the drugs that you were supposed to take for diabetes or hypertension, just take it, as opposed to not take it, we could save $7,000, $3,000 per patient per year.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.
- Dale Carnegie
I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.
- Larry Page
I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.
- Elon Musk
Obama does not like the issue of where he was born.
- Donald Trump
Why is this mediocre? We love to point out how broken our systems are. We enjoy getting angry at hotels or government agencies or airlines that are so obviously doing a poor job. Idiots! But we almost never look at merely mediocre products and wonder why they aren’t great. Mediocre services or products do what they’re supposed to, but have set the bar so low that it’s hardly worth the energy to cross the street to buy them. A resolute generic sameness pervades this mediocrity. Why isn’t every restaurant meal a fabulous buy for the money? Why isn’t every tax dollar spent with the intensity and focus it could be spent with? It seems as though we are willing to accept mediocre as long as the product, the service, or the organization isn’t totally broken.
- Seth Godin
I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–1862)
- Timothy Ferriss
We want to do a lot of stuff, we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.
- Napoleon Hill
I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.
- Oprah Winfrey
Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it’s a good thing they’ll be reading a newspaper on a screen.
- Bill Gates
Too often, sales reps simply regurgitate their presentations and expect to land the sale. It doesn’t work.
- Harvey Mackay
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
If we say it long enough eventually we’re going to reap a harvest. We’re going to get exactly what we’re saying.
- Joel Olsteen
God never promised that we wouldn’t have challenges. In fact, He said just the opposite. His word says, ‘Be truly glad!…these trials are only to test your faith, to see whether or not it is strong and pure…’ so if your faith remains strong after being tried in the test tube of fiery trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day of His return.
- Joel Olsteen
My politics are: I’m a trustbuster. Very focused. And yeah, I’m pro-efficiency. I want the most economic activity at the lowest price possible. It’s good for everybody; it’s not red or blue.
- Travis Kalanick
And because no matter who you are, if you believe in yourself and your dream, New York will always be the place for you.
- Michael Bloomberg
In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching.
- Bill Gates
There are a great many wetless” bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them. To plunge is the only way.
- Dale Carnegie
confusion is the main cause of worry.
- Dale Carnegie
You only have to succeed the last time.
- Phil Knight
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
Ridiculous yachts and private planes and big limousines wont make people enjoy life more, and it sends out terrible messages to the people who work for them. It would be so much better if that money was spent in Africa and its about getting a balance.
- Richard Branson
And in urology, it could be drugs or devices for bladder and prostate problems.
- David Pyott
You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.
- Lee Iacocca
Faith activates God – Fear activates the Enemy.
- Joel Olsteen
For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
- Peter Thiel
So, the judgment that you have to make is (a) is this market really much bigger (more than an order of magnitude) than has been exploited to date? and (b) are we going to be number one? If the answer to either (a) or (b) is no, then you should consider selling.
- Ben Horowitz





