Notable Quotables

I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

- Thomas Jefferson

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

- Bill Gates

I’ve seen the promised land, and there is good news. You can have it all.

- Timothy Ferriss

Don’t grow accustomed to living with less, doing less, and being less to the point that you eventually sit back and accept it.

- Joel Olsteen

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.

- Bill Gates

Americans reading the paper, listening to the news every single day, and all you hear is things are getting worse and worse. And that has a psychological effect on consumer confidence. That’s what consumer confidence is.

- Howard Schultz

Say ‘Hello’ in tones that bespeak how pleased you are to have the person call.

- Dale Carnegie

During their lifetimes, every man and woman will stumble across a great opportunity. Sadly, most of them will simply pick themselves up, dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing ever happened.

- Winston Churchill

Don’t settle in the land of barely enough. That is where you are, it is not who you are. That’s your location, it’s not your identity. No matter what it looks like, have an abundant mentality.

- Joel Olsteen

Seeing his education soley in utilitarian terms, he studied hard, but showed no intellectual playfulness.

- Ron Chernow

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

- James C. Collins

I think Twitter is the future of communications and Square will be the payment network.

- Jack Dorsey

Ultimately, broadcasters and advertisers have to change the way they do business or they run the risk of linear TV becoming obsolete.

- Charles Ergen

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

- Thomas Jefferson

The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.

- Walt Disney

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.

- Yoda

Well, it’s very clear that the Arab population is rising because they’d like to have a say in the running of their affairs, running of their government, and this is very legitimate.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

You will give birth to more in the future than you’ve lost in the past.

- Joel Olsteen

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

- Yoda

Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.

- Tadashi Yanai

Don’t marry too early in life. It’s better to work hard when young and establish a career first.

- Lee Shau Kee

Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used them….

- Thomas Edison

Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.

- Ben Horowitz

A great business has to have a conscience. You have to know who you are and who you are not.

- Howard Schultz

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

- Cheng Yu-tung

If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.

- Richard Branson

I see tremendous imbalance in the world. A very uneven playing field, which has gotten tilted very badly. I consider it unstable. At the same time, I don’t exactly see what is going to reverse it.

- George Soros

Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.

- Walt Disney

There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize any-one. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.

- Dale Carnegie

Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about “let’s see” and “try.” If there’s no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated.

- Seth Godin

It’s a libel to say that I use my newspapers to support my other business interests. The fact is, I haven’t got any other business interests.

- Rupert Murdoch

I think if you look at people, whether in business or government, who haven’t had any moral compass, who’ve just changed to say whatever they thought the popular thing was, in the end they’re losers.

- Michael Bloomberg

The third way is less common and certainly less of a layup—a culture of integrity, meaning a culture of honesty, transparency, fairness, and strict adherence to rules and regulations. In such cultures, there can be no head fakes or winks. People who break the rules do not leave the company for “personal reasons” or to “spend more time with their families.” They are hanged—publicly—and the reasons are made painfully clear to everyone.

- Jack Welch

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

- Henry Ford

Bordeaux would be naive not to recognize that Robert Parker was driving the brand equity. If the next generation doesn’t care about Chateau Pichon-Lalande, then you have a problem.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Entrepreneurs must protect themselves and the venture at all times by documenting your agreements.

- Jack Nadel

I’d be happy to provide advice if anybody asked me no matter who the President is.

- Michael Bloomberg

The problem with New Year’s resolutions – and resolutions to ‘get in better shape’ in general, which are very amorphous – is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn’t work. I don’t care if you’re a world-class CEO – you’ll quit.

- Timothy Ferriss

If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.

- Henry Ford

When you wake up every day, you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative; an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist. It’s all a matter of perspective.

- Harvey Mackay

Its obvious that we don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything.

- Thomas Edison

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

- Dale Carnegie

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

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

- Napoleon Hill

Passion can overcome fear – the fear of losing, of failing, of being traditional.

- Seth Godin

From age 16, I lived and breathed wine. I read every magazine and book about wine.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.

- Oprah Winfrey

I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. I do not read management or economics.

- Peter Drucker

Whether it’s eight o’clock in the morning or eight o’clock at night, I always try to greet others before they have a chance to speak to me.

- Zig Ziglar

If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.

- Peter Thiel

Enemy submarines are to be called U-Boats. The term submarine is to be reserved for Allied under water vessels. U-Boats are those dastardly villains who sink our ships, while submarines are those gallant and noble craft which sink theirs.

- Winston Churchill

I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.

- Lawrence Bossidy

Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new.

- Seth Godin

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

- Elon Musk

Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest. Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends.

- Dale Carnegie

Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris.

- Peter Thiel

You always have to give something when you get something.

- Jack Nadel

The sad truth is, if you push hard enough, and if you’re so stubborn that you must have things your way, God will sometimes allow you to undertake a project without His blessing or at the wrong time. The problem with that, of course, is when you start something in your own strength and in your own timing, you’re going to have to finish it and maintain it in your own strength.

- Joel Olsteen

But entrepreneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriously.

- Peter Thiel

Acquiring Sunseeker deepens Wanda’s international influence and represents an important step forward for the development of the business.

- Wang Jianlin

Dr. Franklin says “it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.

- P.T. Barnum

School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.

- Reed Hastings

True economy consists in always making the income exceed the out-go. Wear the old clothes a little longer if necessary; dispense with the new pair of gloves; mend the old dress: live on plainer food if need be; so that, under all circumstances, unless some unforeseen accident occurs, there will be a margin in favor of the income.

- P.T. Barnum

It’s quite complicated and sounds circular, but we’ve worked out a way of calculate a Web site’s importance.

- Larry Page

I’m sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn’t on our radar screen. We were just making great software.

- Bill Gates

We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.

- Dale Carnegie

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

I kept saying, Sam, we’re making a good living. Why go out why expand so much more? The stores are getting farther and farther away. After the seventeenth store, though, I realized there wasn’t going to any stopping it.

- Helen Walton

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

I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don’t laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that’s not real laughter.

- Steve Martin

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

- Henry Ford

There are ways of fighting for your interests. I never do something in business that I wouldn’t do in life.

- Vladimir Potanin

A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.

- Reid Hoffman

It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through.

- Zig Ziglar

The politics of partisanship and the resulting inaction and excuses have paralyzed decision-making, primarily at the federal level, and the big issues of the day are not being addressed, leaving our future in jeopardy.

- Michael Bloomberg

Any great founders need to get out of the way of the company.

- Jack Dorsey

Macau has been steady. The shocking, unexpected government is the one in Washington.

- Stephen Wynn

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

- Haruki Murakami

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

- Peter Thiel

You hit what you aim at, and if you aim at nothing you will hit it every time.

- Zig Ziglar

Our improvement and innovative ideas have never been hindered by our proven record, which instead has paved the way for determined, practical development and new directions.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I came over from Wal-Mart to help set up Sam’s. Since we were patterned after PRICE CLUBS, sometimes we copied them without exactly knowing what we were doing. We were bringing a West Coast idea to the Midwest, and we didn’t know how it would be received. I remember one idea that didn’t transfer too well. Price Club had a huge stack of wine in front of its stores. We bought the same amound for our stores in the Midwest and we learned the hard way that Midwesterners aren’t exactly wine drinkers. (on competition)

- Ron Loveles

There would be no advantage to be gained by sowing a field of wheat if the harvest did not return more than was sown.

- Napoleon Hill

Success is not what you have, but who you are.

- Bo Bennett

At first, we couldn’t be establishment, because we didn’t have any money. We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our industry, we’ve had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned.

- Phil Knight

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