Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.
- Oscar Wilde
Notable Quotables
I’m optimistic about the country. I’m optimistic about the American people.
- Howard Schultz
It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
- Warren Buffett
I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.
- Bill Gates
Everything begins with a decision. Then, we have to manage that decision for the rest of your life.
- John C. Maxwell
Strange as it sounds, great leaders gain authority by giving it away.
- Napoleon Hill
Politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business. Large stores, gilt signs, flaming advertisements, will all prove unavailing if you or your employees treat your patrons abruptly. The truth is, the more kind and liberal a man is, the more generous will be the patronage bestowed upon him.
- P.T. Barnum
For me, the most fun is change or growth. There are definitely elements of both that I like. Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn boat.
- Tony Hsieh
I think our main real estate effort should be directed at getting out in front of expansion and letting the population build out to us.
- Sam Walton
You want supply to always be full, and you use price to basically either bring more supply on or get more supply off, or get more demand in the system or get some demand out. It’s classic Econ 101.
- Travis Kalanick
I never worry because I know who I am and I know Whose I am.
- Zig Ziglar
A lovely nook of forest scenery, or a grand rock, like a beautiful woman, depends for much of its attractiveness upon the attendance sense of freedom from whatever is low; upon a sense of purity and of romance.
- P.T. Barnum
As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.
- Donald Trump
Anything that’s not necessary for you to do personally should be delegated or eliminated.
- John Maxwell
There are seldom, if ever, any hopeless situations, but there are many people who lose hope in the face of some situations.
- Zig Ziglar
Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First he gets up everyday bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever know. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction. (qualities of great leaders)
- David Glass
In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that’s safer, doesn’t require us to go around the world to get all our oil.
- Bill Gates
My belief as a Christian is when we receive Christ as salvation, that that gives us a guarantee for Heaven.
- Joel Olsteen
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
- Jerry Seinfeld
They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
- Aldous Huxley
Always render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be.
- Og Mandino
That’s the goal, isn’t it? For every crack to be filled with your ideas and innovations and creativity? The only way to achieve this, though, is to be prepared for many of them to fail, to land on pavement, to be perfect yet cease to grow. We can cry about these failures, but that will lead us to hold back on the next idea. Or we can celebrate them, realizing that it’s proof that we’re being promiscuous in our shipping, putting the best work we can into the world, regardless of whether this particular idea actually works. When was the last time you set out to be promiscuous in your failures?
- Seth Godin
By establishing a reputation as being a person who always renders more service and better service than that for which you are paid, you will benefit by comparison with those around you who do not render such service, and the contrast will be so noticeable that there will be keen competition for your services, no matter what your life-work may be.
- Napoleon Hill
I’ve been fascinated with technology since I was a boy banging around on my father’s adding machine. Back then I’d type in an equation, the device made some cool noises, and out came my answer. I was hooked.
- Michael Dell
I would argue heavily that the time that has been allocated to social used to come from television, and people are benefitting from it. People who are saying, ‘Aw, you’re spending all your time on Facebook, or all your time on Twitter,’ I’d like to understand what the person used to do with that time.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
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
Who you are, is who you attract.
- John Maxwell
Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective – doing less – is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.
- Timothy Ferriss
Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen.
- Winston Churchill
In difficult times, we’re not supposed to quit believing; we’re not supposed to quit growing.
- Joel Olsteen
We are very happy to be reporting that our pro-forma earnings passed the $1 billion mark for the first time.
- John Chambers
We don’t want disruption where we just move things around from point a to point b. We want a direction, we want a purpose.
- Jack Dorsey
Nowhere are the benefits of closer economic ties more pronounced than in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The two places have their own advantages. One has the manpower, natural resources and manufacturing might, while the other has the management skills and marketing know-how.
- Cheng Yu-tung
We would be interested in anything used by neurologists, such as treatments for epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and pain medication.
- David Pyott
In the Next Society’s corporation, top management will be the company. Everything else can be outsourced.
- Peter Drucker
The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players. A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.
- Steve Jobs
I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
- Elon Musk
Occasionally a man stumbles over the truth. Most dust themselves off and continue walking as though nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
- Elon Musk
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
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
- Albert Einstein
The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.
- Sam Walton
The mistake that’s so easy to make is to get greedy as you choose your hive, to say, “this product is for everyone” or “anyone can benefit from this idea.” Well, there are seven billion people on the planet, so it’s unlikely your comment is correct; even if it is, there’s little chance that a virus would spread across a hive that big.
- Seth Godin
Don’t equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don’t let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you’d like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea.
- Harvey Mackay
Use your feelings, Obi-Wan, and find him you will.
- Yoda
Allow yourself to get on the same side of the desk and solve the problems together.
- Jack Nadel
At the end, the acquisition of wealth is ignoble in the extreme. I assume that you save and long for wealth only as a means of enabling you the better to do some good in your day and generation.
- Andrew Carnegie
No one can make you jealous, angry, vengeful, or greedy — unless you let him.
- Napoleon Hill
The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.
- Peter Drucker
Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.
- Napoleon Hill
A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
- Peter Thiel
I believe God wants you to have money to pay your bills, send your kids to college and do charity work and build orphanages. There’s the teaching that we’re supposed to be poor to show that we’re humble. I don’t buy that. I think we’re supposed to be leaders. We’re supposed to excel.
- Joel Olsteen
Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself, believe.
- Winston Churchill
The Web provides a very easy way to immediately grasp what’s going on. It really offers the transparency, so you can see, especially with the search engine, how people are using Twitter at one glance. The phone doesn’t allow for that.
- Jack Dorsey
Eating words has never given me indigestion.
- Winston Churchill
A much better idea would have been to give the problem to the people who could not only fix it, but who would also be personally excited and motivated to do so.
- Ben Horowitz
It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.
- Elon Musk
If you are a big company, a big website, and lots of users come to your website, you will have attacks, and you have to deal with that. It just cannot be a reason to take actions to exit certain markets.
- Robin Li
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
Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.
- Bill Gates
Applied Faith – Faith is a state of mind through which your aims, desires, plans and purposes may be translated into their physical or financial equivalent.
- Napoleon Hill
I think the most productive thing to do during times of change is to be your best self, not the best version of someone else.
- Seth Godin
For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
- Bill Gates
Good leaders know that one secret to success is to staff their weaknesses.
- John Maxwell
If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.
- Henry Ford
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.
- Winston Churchill
Our business is about technology, yes. But it’s also about operations and customer relationships.
- Michael Dell
Skills are cheap. Passion is priceless.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Many a false step was made by standing still.
- Timothy Ferriss
I’m just like so many women – I was frustrated, I had these white pants that I had spent a lot of money on, and you get home and you think, ‘What am I really supposed to wear under this?’ So it was a frustrated consumer moment.
- Sara Blakely
Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don’t have investments in.
- Ben Horowitz
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. To know all is to forgive all.
- Dale Carnegie
Everything about my journey to get Spanx off the ground entailed me having to be a salesperson – from going to the hosiery mills to get a prototype made to calling Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. I had to position myself to get five minutes in the door with buyers.
- Sara Blakely
Very important people have told me that they prefer good listeners to good talkers, but the ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait.
- Dale Carnegie
Out-innovating them is the way to beat China. And to do everything that we do in this country to support innovative policy, that drives innovation and new products and more jobs and creates jobs. You can’t – you can’t put a wall up around here. We tried that in the ’30s. It didn’t work.
- Jack Welch
Humor can often be effective and with this style, it’s emphasized. Appeal to the journalist’s heightened sense of the unusual. Stunts, sideshows, ancillary themes are put to work here.
- Michael Levine
There’s no substitute for a full-time dad. Dads who are fully engaged with their kids overwhelmingly tend to produce children who believe in themselves and live full lives.
- Tony Dungy
Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.
- Winston Churchill
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
Wanamaker learned this lesson early, but I personally had to blunder through this old world for a third of a century before it even began to dawn upon me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticise themselves for anything no matter how wrong it may be.
- Dale Carnegie
Trust your instincts
- Estée Lauder
We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.
- Winston Churchill
Nearly every person who develops an idea works at it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.
- Thomas Edison
Cherish your visions and dreams as they are the children of your soul. The blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
- Napoleon Hill
It makes no difference where you go, there you are. And it makes no difference what you have, there’s always more to want. Until you are happy with who you are, you will never be happy because of what you have.
- Zig Ziglar
The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.
- Elon Musk
If you want to take the island, you have to burn the boats.
- David Nilssen
OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me ‘Trey’ because I’m William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I’m also known.
- Bill Gates
I now eat four Brazil nuts and one tablespoon of almond butter first thing upon waking.
- Timothy Ferriss
It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.
- Dale Carnegie
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
- Peter Thiel
If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.
- Harvey Mackay
People are more comfortable learning about wine because now they can just Google, you know, ‘Soave,’ and say, ‘Oh, O.K., cool.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.
- Jack Welch
Every well built house started in the form of a definite purpose plus a definite plan in the nature of a set of blueprints.
- Napoleon Hill
Our economy now rewards artists far more than any other economy in history ever has.
- Seth Godin
My first account was Neiman Marcus. I cold-called them just like I had cold-called businesses when I was selling fax machines for seven years.
- Sara Blakely
Education comes from within, you get it by struggle and effort and thought.
- Napoleon Hill
