A man must choose his own way of life, and…it is only by following out one’s own bent that there can be the really harmonious life.
- Winston Churchill
Notable Quotables
CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.
- Peter Thiel
A little boy went out to the backyard to play with a baseball bat and a ball. He said to himself, I am the best hitter in the world.” Then he threw the ball up in the air and took a swing at it, but he missed. Without a moment’s hesitation, he picked up the ball and tossed it in the air again, saying as he swung the bat, I’m the best hitter in all the world.” He swung and missed. Strike two. He tossed the ball up again, concentrating more intensely, even more determined, saying, I am the best hitter in all the world!” He swung the bat with all his might. Whiff! Strike three. The little boy laid down his bat and smiled real big. What do you know?” he said. I’m the best pitcher in all the world!
- Joel Olsteen
You don’t have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.
- Michael Dell
I am proof that you can you make money in Italy and be honest.
- Leonardo Del Vecchio
I was leading a lot of idea and the vision for where the product was going. Ev [Evan Williams] was funding and supporting what we were doing. He put the shelter over our heads. And Biz [Stone] was just an amazingly creative guy.
- Jack Dorsey
Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
- Ben Horowitz
In early 2009, the property market was still being driven by pessimistic sentiment and a wait-and-see attitude, leading to a further drop in the transaction volume.
- Lee Shau Kee
Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so love the people who treat you right, forget about the ones who don’t, and believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.
- Harvey Mackay
You are not your resume, you are your work.
- Seth Godin
Options – the ability to choose – is real power. This book is all about how to see and create those options with the least effort and cost. It just so happens, paradoxically, that you can make more money – a lot more money – by doing half of what you are doing now.
- Timothy Ferriss
In his rigidgly compartmentalized life, each hour was tightly budgeted, whether for business, religion, family or exercise. Perhaps those daily rituals helped him deal with the underlying tensions that might otherwise have become ungovernable, for although he tried to project to an air of unhurried calm, he was under terrific strain the surface, was constantly on edge. In one of his few admissions of weakness he recalled, for years on end I never had a solid night’s sleep, worrying about how it was to come out…I tossed about in bed night after night worrying over the outcome…All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate for the anxiety of that period.
- Ron Chernow
Performance of the local property leasing market showed gradual improvement, particularly with demand rising substantially for the leasing of grade A as well as grad B office properties, and part of these properties registered an increase of over 50% as compared to the level as at the end of last year.
- Lee Shau Kee
If you concentrate on what you have, you will always end up having more. If you focus on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.
- Oprah Winfrey
The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
- Oprah Winfrey
Meeting sports athletes that are the best in the world is a thrill to this day.
- Phil Knight
The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny.The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe.The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away. It likes a vendetta and has no trouble getting angry.The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival.A squirrel runs around looking for nuts, hiding from foxes, listening for predators, and watching for other squirrels. The squirrel does this because that’s all it can do. All the squirrel has is a lizard brain.The only correct answer to ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ is ‘Because it’s lizard brain told it to.’ Wild animals are wild because the only brain they posses is a lizard brain.The lizard brain is not merely a concept. It’s real, and it’s living on the top of your spine, fighting for your survival. But, of course, survival and success are not the same thing.The lizard brain is the reason you’re afraid, the reason you don’t do all the art you can, the reason you don’t ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance.
- Seth Godin
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
I have the best job I could possibly have.
- Michael Bloomberg
Some of the biggest failures I’ve ever met, are people that have never failed.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Education and the Internet must go hand in hand, … It will serve as one of the great equalizers.
- John Chambers
We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger, how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.
- Winston Churchill
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
- Thomas Edison
Sales is what you do in person, one on one. Marketing is sales done via a system. Most (Self-Employed) S quadrant businesspeople are very good at one-on-one sales. For them to make the transition to the B quadrant, they need to learn how to sell through a system which is called marketing.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The one essential character trait of any leader is personal integrity.
- David Novak
Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
- John F. Kennedy
I intentionally abandoned the hard stuff early on because not only do I think it’s useless, I think it’s a distraction.
- Seth Godin
Everything popular is wrong.
- Oscar Wilde
Get your fire back.
- Joel Olsteen
Man will occasionally stumble upon the truth but most times he will pick himself up and continue on.
- Winston Churchill
If parents pass enthusiasm along to their children, they will leave them an estate of incalculable value….
- Thomas Edison
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
No company has a culture, every company is a culture.
- Peter Thiel
Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
- Steve Jobs
Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.
- Steve Wozniak
It was really an easy decision for me to be a part of the Lakers. It’s priceless. It is one of the few places where I truly get lost in the joy of the moment of that game. All of the stresses and all the responsibilities are gone.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very different things.
- Timothy Ferriss
What you get by achieving your goals is not nearly as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
- Zig Ziglar
With communication technology in general, there’s a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world’s entire population using one communication technology, that’s a big deal. It’s beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it’s a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.
- Ben Horowitz
Tip #1 – Self-motivation is the key to success and will achieve powerful results.
- Jack Nadel
Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
- Seth Godin
So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.
- Thomas Edison
Ultimately you want to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind
- Sergey Brin
It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
- Jerry Seinfeld
A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.
- Steve Wozniak
If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent’s good will.
- Dale Carnegie
An enterprise shall take care of the people’s livelihood, through thick and thin…
- Cheng Yu-tung
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
- Albert Einstein
Great ideas originate in the muscles.
- Thomas Edison
Do what you want to do. Do what you like to do.
- Lei Jun
You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.
- Reid Hoffman
Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.
- Winston Churchill
You must practically educate yourself, regardless of your accessibility to formal education.
- Abraham Lincoln
Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
- Albert Einstein
When you are the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you are basically saying, ‘I’m right and everyone else is wrong.’ That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilaration and the same time an invitation to be attacked.
- Larry Ellison
Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.
- Timothy Ferriss
God, I’m ready. I’m taking the limits off of You. I’m enlarging my vision. I may not see a way but I know You have a way. I declare I’m coming into a shift.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t feel under-taxed in any way at all.
- Jack Welch
General and undifferentiated pitches don’t say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others.
- Peter Thiel
Lack of Enthusiasm.
- Napoleon Hill
There’s never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.
- Zig Ziglar
I want to get involved in things that makes a difference in peoples lives and lifts them up. I don’t want to be a part of anything that’s not inspiring or helpful to the community that I’m serving.
- Russell Simmons
There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.
- Roger Staubach
I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.
- Elon Musk
If I go public, I’ll stick to it.
- David Novak
I just think that – when a country needs more income and we do, we’re only taking in 15 percent of GDP, I mean, that – that – when a country needs more income, they should get it from the people that have it.
- Warren Buffett
I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don’t believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me.
- Ronald Perelman
When it’s too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley.
- Sergey Brin
Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that’s more productive.
- Donald Trump
No matter how many times people say it – ‘Oh, I’m just writing this for myself’ ‘Oh, I’m just doing this for myself’ – nobody’s doing it for themselves! You’re doing it for an audience. So whether I’m performing or writing a book or playing music, it’s definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely.
- Steve Martin
The market is fast-moving, fast-growing. Things that are true today may not be true tomorrow.
- Robin Li
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
- Jerry Seinfeld
There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
- Peter Thiel
My favorite museums are things like the Frick Museum in New York and the Huntington Hartford in Pasadena where it’s someone’s home that you walk through.
- Larry Ellison
I like the idea that one thing leads to another. You can tweet something completely innocuous, and then find yourself going off on a tangent that’s inspired by a response.
- Steve Martin
When I came into office, people said, ‘Billionaire? How do they live? What do they eat? How do they sleep?’ Today, they see me on the subway coming uptown. A couple of people say hi, some people smile and nod. Some people just sleep. It’s not an issue.
- Michael Bloomberg
While 9:00 to 5:00 and what happens in the job is important… what happens from 5:00 – 9:00 while you’re off the job is INFINITELY more important.
- Zig Ziglar
I came from a Hindi medium school… the principal felt that I would not fit into an English medium college. Though I was top in my class in school, and I got admission in other colleges, but I really wanted to study in St. Xavier’s.
- Lakshmi Mittal
Although it’s admirable to be ambitious and hard-working, it’s more desirable to be smart-working.
- John C. Maxwell
Starbucks has changed the rules of engagement for the music industry.
- Howard Schultz
A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.
- Timothy Ferriss
Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying.
- Peter Thiel
If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you’ll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job.
- Seth Godin
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.
- Winston Churchill
The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people – including my ex-wives.
- Ronald Perelman
The lower and individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential.
- John Maxwell
Don’t interrupt me while I’m interrupting.
- Winston Churchill
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.
- Winston Churchill
I readily absorb ideas from every source, frequently starting where the last person left off.
- Thomas Edison
Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.
- Peter Thiel
I’m going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.
- Joel Olsteen
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
[In June 2011] We’re focused on building a product and a business. Going public is an instrument and tool to help sustain the company. In the future, there may be an IPO, but I don’t know what the timing is.
- Jack Dorsey
Speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves.
- Proverbs 31:8
Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don’t know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.
- Sam Walton
Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.
- Walt Disney
Actually, King Abdullah, under his supervision and guidance, has established a dialogue in Saudi Arabia whereby all the population, whether Shiite or Sunnis from north, south, west or east, they can get together and exchange their views.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Yesterday ended last night. Today is a brand new day and it’s yours.
- Zig Ziglar
I think it’s too early to tell.
- John Chambers





