If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.
- Anthony Robbins
Notable Quotables
The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’
- Jeff Bezos
I love building technology, I love programming. I love building teams. And I also love building beautiful things.
- Jack Dorsey
Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Africa is on the rise.
- Bill Gates
What would have happened to me if I would not have believed I would see the goodness of God?
- Joel Olsteen
When you have got a thing where you want, it is a good thing to leave it where it is.
- Winston Churchill
I demand pretty aggressive goal setting and a commitment to measured progress towards those goals because I don’t like surprises. I don’t even like good surprises.
- Abigail Johnson
Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.
- Jack Dorsey
Few people are logical. Most of us are prejudiced and biased. Most of us are blighted with preconceived notions, with jealousy, suspicion, fear, envy and pride.
- Dale Carnegie
If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth
- Ray Kroc
Without courage all other virtues lose their meaning.
- Winston Churchill
We are not in the business of iron ore. Whatever captive iron ore sources we have, we use it to make steel.
- Lakshmi Mittal
The idea of Twitter started with me working in dispatch since I was 15 years old, where taxi cabs or firetrucks would broadcast where they were and what they were doing.
- Jack Dorsey
No one lives long enough to learn it all..
- Brian Tracy
I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product.
- Ben Horowitz
If you don’t plan your time, someone else will help you waste it.
- Zig Ziglar
In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?
- Jack Welch
E – Executions, how to get things done
- Jack Welch
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
- Bill Gates
The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization…. Such war-making weapons should be developed – but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation.
- Thomas Edison
The Group is well positioned to meet the challenges ahead and will as ever continue to pursue higher growth.
- Cheng Yu-tung
This is just going to be a great event and we have an outstanding speaker.
- Jack Taylor
Refrain from throwing the executive under the bus.
- Ben Horowitz
The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.
- Phil Knight
God can do what humanoids cannot.
- Clay Clark
I’d learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw – shapes of characters and things.
- Steve Wozniak
Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise.
- Dale Carnegie
When a study was made a few years ago on runaway wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main reason wives ran away? It was lack of appreciation.
- Dale Carnegie
Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy.
- Bill Gates
The S.A.L.H. were mostly South Africans, with a high proportion of hardbitten adventurers from all quarters of the world, including a Confederate trooper from the American Civil War.
- Winston Churchill
It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.
- Steve Jobs
You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
- Elon Musk
Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11.
- Michael Bloomberg
Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today. So think thoughts of hope and confidence and love and success.
- Dale Carnegie
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
Every setback is a setup for a comeback.
- Joel Olsteen
It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.
- Larry Page
You can be committed to Church but not committed to Christ, but you cannot be committed to Christ and not committed to church.
- Joel Olsteen
It is very important to grasp that Level 5 leadership is not just about humility and modesty. It is equally about ferocious resolve, an almost stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great.
- James C. Collins
I’m not a macroeconomics person.
- Bill Gates
The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.
- Peter Thiel
The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.
- Phil Knight
It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I absolutely don’t have $20 billion. But I’d love to, right?
- Jack Ma
Cherish you visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blue prints of your ultimate achievements.
- Napoleon Hill
Starting means you’re going to finish. If it doesn’t ship, you’ve failed. You haven’t poked the box if the box doesn’t realize it’s been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it’s merely a hobby.
- Seth Godin
There is far more opportunity than there is ability.
- Thomas Edison
I forgive all personal weaknesses except egomania and pretension.
- Herb Kelleher
[On a company founder.] A founder is not a job, it’s a role, it’s an attitude. And it’s something that can happen again, and again, and again. In fact it has to happen, again and again and again. Otherwise we would not move forward.
- Jack Dorsey
When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.
- Peter Thiel
Extraordinary results are directlydetermined by how narrow you can make your focus.
- Gary Keller
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
- Reid Hoffman
Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.
- Napoleon Hill
Contrary to popular belief, the price of real estate does go down on occasion.
- Robert Kiyosaki
No individual may have great power without availing himself of the Master Mind.
- Napoleon Hill
Mrs. Carnegie and I had dinner at a friend’s house in Chicago. While carving the meat, he did something wrong. I didn’t notice it; and I wouldn’t have cared even if I had noticed it. But his wife saw it and jumped down his throat right in front of us. John,” she cried, watch what you are doing! Can’t you ever learn to serve properly!” Then she said to us: He is always making mistakes. He just doesn’t try.” Maybe he didn’t try to carve; but I certainly give him credit for trying to live with her for twenty years. Frankly, I would rather have eaten a couple of hot dogs with mustard—in an atmosphere of peace—than to have dined on Peking duck and shark fins while listening to her scolding.
- Dale Carnegie
Apart from banking facilities of a relatively small proportion which were raised in Renminbi, the majority of the Group’s funding facilities are obtained in Hong Kong Dollars and the Group’s exposure to foreign exchange fluctuation riks is therefore extremely small.
- Lee Shau Kee
Facing reality sounds simple, but it isn’t. I found it hard to get people to see a situation for what it is and not for what it was, or what they hoped it would be.
- Jack Welch
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
Unless you choose to do great things with it, it makes no difference how much you are rewarded, or how much power you have.
- Oprah Winfrey
Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.
- Peter Thiel
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Unwavering courage based upon knowledge of self, and of one’s occupation. No follower wishes to be dominated by a leader who lacks self-confidence and courage. No intelligent follower will be dominated by such a leader very long.
- Napoleon Hill
Too often the investment in people stops there.
- Ben Horowitz
The thing about the banjo is, when you first hear it, it strikes many people as ‘What’s that?’ There’s something very compelling about it to certain people; that’s the way I was; that’s the way a lot of banjo players and people who love the banjo are.
- Steve Martin
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
- Steve Jobs
Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.
- Michael Gerber
Starbucks has stores in America in many, many communities that are governed by many, many different municipalities. Starbucks cannot dictate to a municipality in Cincinnati or Kansas City or Sacramento how or why or when there should be a recycling program.
- Howard Schultz
I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.
- Bill Gates
Pick a movement. Pick something you believe in. Pick something you want to have an impact in and then question every single thing and be a founder, and be an entrepreneur inside those organizations and inside that movement.
- Jack Dorsey
Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship…the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
- Peter Drucker
We’d like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers.
- Seth Godin
Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
- Dale Carnegie
My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.
- Dale Carnegie
I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.
- Oprah Winfrey
Our job as founders as entrepreneurs is to distribute the future that’s already here.
- Jack Dorsey
Success is…knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.
- John C. Maxwell
My financial service business is the absolute best thing I have done to empower the poor. I run many charities and fight many political causes, but my financial service company is the greatest gift I’ve given.
- Russell Simmons
Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.
- Peter Thiel
Good communication is a give-and-take proposition. Don’t think of your pitch as a short speech, after which you get a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
- Michael Levine
We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.
- Winston Churchill
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
All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That’s why the word “salesman” can be a slur and the used car dealer is our archetype of shadiness. But we only react negatively to awkward, obvious salesmen—that is, the bad ones.
- Peter Thiel
What you get by achieving your goals is not nearly as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
- Zig Ziglar
Lay out what you’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
- David Novak
When someone we love is having difficulty and is giving us a bad time, it’s better to explore the cause than to criticize the action.
- Zig Ziglar
No leader enjoys making the tough decision. We constantly faced severe resistence from even the best people in our organization. I’ve struggled with this problem myself and have often been guilty of not being rigorous enough. Every impulse is to look the other way.
- Jack Welch
Urm. Put a shield on my saber I must.
- Yoda
It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.
- Bill Gates
Newspaper readership is still growing in India.
- Bill Gates
You have to act and act now.
- Larry Ellison
A student of life considers the world a classroom.
- Harvey Mackay
I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun.
- Reed Hastings
When Sam feels a certain way, he is relentless. He will just wear you out. He will bring up an idea, and we’ll discuss it and then decide maybe that it’s not something we should be doing right now or ever. Fine. Case closed. But as long as he is convinced that it is the right thing, it just keep coming up week after week – until finally everybody capitulates and says, well it’s easier to do it than to keep fighting this fight. I guess it could be called management by wearing you down.
- David Glass
Abe Lincoln once remarked that most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
- Dale Carnegie
We are currently not planning on conquering the world.
- Sergey Brin
Selling is the highest paid profession in the world. Our leaders in business, politics, research and the arts are all great sales people or they have great sales people on their payrolls.
- Jerry Vass
In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done, and they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield…march straightforward.
- Winston Churchill
