Notable Quotables

The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.

- Clayton M. Christensen

Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so diplomatic, so adroit at handling people, that he was made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his success? I will speak ill of no man,” he said, … and speak all the good I know of everybody.

- Dale Carnegie

Here is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it could give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition. Deep in the nature of the men who had broken the King’s power was the conviction that law in his name was the sole foundation on which they could build.

- Winston Churchill

Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don’t let these feelings stop them.

- T. Harv Eker

I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.

- Phil Knight

Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

- Walt Disney

There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.

- Ben Horowitz

The local property market remained volatile throughout the period under review due to negative developments occurring both in the local as well as overseas markets.

- Lee Shau Kee

Do you know how many companies have wanted me to do an energy drink for them because I named my book ‘Crush It!’? It might be fun one day, but right now I think it would undermine the personal brand I’ve built.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.

- Ben Horowitz

In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.

- James C. Collins

I’ve always been – you know, my personality is motivating and encouraging. And so I’m just being who God made me to be.

- Joel Olsteen

I pay about a third in taxes, I give away about a third, and I follow the law.

- Ray Dalio

I believe that continued strong consumer acceptance of our products at retail and the strengthening of our organization will enable us to manage through the challenges in our U. S. footwear business and lay the foundation for another round of growth.

- Phil Knight

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

- Winston Churchill

Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson.

- Winston Churchill

No one knows more about the way you think than you do.

- Seth Godin

I believe in that Old Chinese Proverb, When the student is willing, the teacher appears. But I would add, It also doesn’t hurt to be a little proactive about it.

- David Novak

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

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’ve found that many of the greatest ideas surface in bars because that’s where many people cultivate inspiration.

- Herb Kelleher

Time can be an ally or an enemy. What it becomes depends entirely upon you, your goals, and your determination to use every available minute.

- Zig Ziglar

The global economy has experienced considerable slowdown in recent times. However there has been one notable exception: China.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital – the world’s best talents and greatest ideas.

- Jack Welch

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.

- James Cameron

Form the habit of systematic saving by putting aside a definite percentage of your income. Money in the bank gives one a very safe foundation of courage…

- Napoleon Hill

You’ve got to be before you can do and do before you can have.

- Zig Ziglar

Rockefeller’s supreme insight was that he could solve the oil industry’s problems by solving the railroad’s problems at the same time, creating a double cartel in oil and rails. One of Rockefeller’s strength in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted and what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advanteous terms. Instead of ruining the railroads, Rockefeller tried to help them prosper, albeit in away that fortified his own position.

- Ron Chernow

You may have made some mistakes, and you may not be where you want to be, but that has NOTHING to do with your future.

- Zig Ziglar

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

- Benjamin Franklin

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

- Ben Horowitz

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

The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.

- Seth Godin

Don’t live worried, frustrated or upset because of what somebody did or what didn’t work out. Come back to a place of peace. It’s not going to work against you; it’s going to work for you.

- Joel Olsteen

I finally realized that being grateful to my body was key to giving more love to myself.

- Oprah Winfrey

We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

- Peter Thiel

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

- Seth Godin

don’t talk about the way you are. Talk about the way you want to be.

- Joel Olsteen

It’s almost unfathomable how much I still have to learn. Learning never ends…I always have another mountain to climb is what keeps you going.

- David Novak

Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.

- Peter Thiel

If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.

- Warren Buffett

Personally, I just hope that my family keeps getting bigger and bigger. That would make me very happy.

- Lee Shau Kee

Passion isn’t project-specific. It’s people-specific.

- Seth Godin

I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.

- Bill Gates

In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.

- Winston Churchill

People around the world, they want the authentic Starbucks experience.

- Howard Schultz

You can’t win by being more average than average.

- Seth Godin

There is no more important economic policy issue today than helping our nation remain the global innovation leader. To do this, our leadership must focus on an aggressive agenda to support math and science education, patent litigation reform, healthcare information technology, and research and development. We thank President Bush for his leadership and urge all members of Congress to address these issues in a comprehensive fashion to get the job done.

- John Chambers

One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace, good people don’t go into government.

- Donald Trump

When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.

- Joel Olsteen

We create stress for ourselves because you feel like you have to do it. You have to. I don’t feel that anymore.

- Oprah Winfrey

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

- Napoleon Hill

Life is too short to spend your precious time trying to convince a person who wants to live in gloom and doom otherwise. Give lifting that person your best shot, but don’t hang around long enough for his/her bad attitude to pull you down. Instead, surround yourself with optimistic people.

- Zig Ziglar

I’d say it’s been my biggest problem of my life…it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.

- Walt Disney

The breadth and maturity of our own businesses is allowing us to weather the prevailing storms.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.

- Rupert Murdoch

Education and the Internet must go hand in hand, … It will serve as one of the great equalizers.

- John Chambers

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

- Jeff Bezos

It’s disappointing, but it’s still a really good book. I’m glad Kenny did it, and I’m glad it’s going to get out. … I still endorse the book. I think everybody should buy it. I think he did a great job on a very complicated topic.

- Phil Knight

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

- Winston Churchill

There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?

- Warren Buffett

I will not talk to God about how big my problems are. I will talk to my problems about how big my God is. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

I guess the worst moment I ever had in business was the fear that Southwest Airlines wouldn’t get off the ground.

- Herb Kelleher

I’ve built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players…I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other. Because they’ve never had a chance to do that before. And they don’t want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates.

- Steve Jobs

Wise men, when in doubt whether to speak or to keep quiet, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and remain silent.

- Napoleon Hill

Like technical debt, management debt comes in too many different forms to elaborate entirely, but a few salient examples will help explain the concept. Here are three of the more popular types among startups: 1. Putting two in the box 2. Overcompensating a key employee, because she gets another job offer 3. No performance management or employee feedback process

- Ben Horowitz

The lifeblood of job creation in America is small business, but they can’t get access to credit.

- Howard Schultz

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

- Reed Hastings

A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.

- Ben Horowitz

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

- Winston Churchill

Andrew Carnegie believed the formula (of Think & Grow Rich) should be taught in all public schools and colleges, and expressed the opinion that if it were properly taught it would so revolutionize the entire education system that the time spent in school could be reduced to less than half….As far as (formal) schooling is concerned, many of the (great american business) men had very little.

- Napoleon Hill

Meeting Coach Wooden, the most humble leader I’ve ever met, made me think about my ego, about as the wise John Weinberg once put it, the difference between growing and swelling.

- David Novak

I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

- Jeff Bezos

As I get, I give. Giving as you get is critical. It has everything to do with being happy for yourself, and making others happy is the cause of making yourself happy, and it’s the cycle of giving and getting.

- Russell Simmons

Everyone is going to binge on a diet, for instance, so plan for it, schedule it, and contain the damage.

- Timothy Ferriss

Apply the blacksmith’s homely principle when you are speaking. If you feel deeply about your subject you will be able to think of little else. Concentration is a process of distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say—fill your mind with your speech-material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears.

- Dale Carnegie

I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.

- Winston Churchill

My first professional job was to sell heavy-duty waterless cookware.

- Zig Ziglar

When a man has accumulated a sum of money, accumulated it within the law, the Government has no right to share in its earnings.

- John D. Rockefeller

I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment…..the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy. A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.

- Peter Drucker

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

- Bill Gates

In the journey of entrepreneurship, tenacity of purpose is supreme.

- Aliko Dangote

Delegating doesn’t mean passing off work you don’t enjoy, but letting your employees stretch their skills and judgment.

- Harvey Mackay

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