I don’t think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good, but on a practical level having dealt with being abandoned by your father, being raised by your alcoholic mom and having severe physical disabilities even today, How do you choose to have the right thoughts?
- Oprah Winfrey
Notable Quotables
There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye.
- Timothy Ferriss
People everywhere love Windows.
- Bill Gates
In view of the good progress made in respect of negotiations relating to Mainland China’s entry to the World Trade Organisation and the boost in local economic activities deriving from the emergence of the new economy, a great number of technology-related and international institutions have established and expanded their businesses in Hong Kong, bringing about substantial increases both in rentals as well as capital values for prime office properties and luxury residential properties.
- Lee Shau Kee
I’m not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.
- Rupert Murdoch
The best investments are on main street, not Wall Street.
- Robert P. Miles
When you expect your employees to act like adults, they generally do. If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.
- Ben Horowitz
These are all commodity-focused issues. The old conceit of a retailer was that if you offered the right products at a fair price in a convenient location, you’d do fine if you watched your expenses. Today, the issues are totally different.
- Seth Godin
I don’t yell at people, I don’t mistreat people. I don’t talk down to people, so no one else in this building, in this vicinity, has the right to do it.
- Oprah Winfrey
Save someone’s face once and your influence with him rises. Save his face every time you can, and there is practically nothing he won’t do for you.
- Dale Carnegie
Following a period of drastic market fluctuations in Asia during the summer months of the previous year, economies in the region gradually improved and stabilised during the financial year.
- Lee Shau Kee
I’m addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.
- Larry Ellison
Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.
- Dale Carnegie
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
- Winston Churchill
Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.
- George Soros
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
- Henry Ford
There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we’ve got a system that allows them to do it.
- Warren Buffett
I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.
- Winston Churchill
In difficult times, we’re not supposed to quit believing; we’re not supposed to quit growing.
- Joel Olsteen
From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.
- Elon Musk
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
Here’s a statistician joke for your next hot date: Person A: What happens when Bill Gates walks into a bar of 55 people? Person B: I don’t know. What? Person A: The average net worth jumps to more than a billion dollars!
- Timothy Ferriss
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.
- Peter Thiel
God wants you to succeed. He created you to live abundantly.
- Joel Olsteen
In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic. You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.
- Bill Gates
You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.
- Jack Welch
We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren’t that many things people use twice a day.
- Larry Page
If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
- Ben Horowitz
I would hope that , where possible, the newspaper will devote more thought to our commercial interests. In my view, there are sometimes news items that require a lot of caution. For instance, articles that talk about contracts being negotiated. There is some news that does more harm than good. The risk is that it threatens the commercial or industrial interests of our country.
- Serge Dassault
It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Time is wasted because there is so much time available.
- Timothy Ferriss
I can’t afford to be indifferent to politics, but I don’t have personal ambitions.
- Vagit Alekperov
Two metrics set the limits for effective distribution. The total net profit that you earn on average over the course of your relationship with a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.
- Peter Thiel
You watch television and see what’s going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing’s going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress.
- Stephen Wynn
Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.
- Warren Buffett
AP pleaded guilty to criminal theft of our software. Let me be clear. I’m not accusing SAP of anything. What did SAP do? Did you engage in criminal behavior and steal lots of Oracle software? Yes. That’s SAP. Who was CEO when you were doing all this criminal stuff? Leo.
- Larry Ellison
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 have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.
- Oprah Winfrey
In tennis, you strike a ball just after the rebound for the fastest return. It’s the same with investment.
- Masayoshi Son
We made a disastrous move into casual shoes.
- Phil Knight
The first step is to establish that something is possible, then probability will occur.
- Elon Musk
IN A NUTSHELL SIX WAYS TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE YOU PRINCIPLE 1 Become genuinely interested in other people. PRINCIPLE 2 Smile. PRINCIPLE 3 Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. PRINCIPLE 4 Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. PRINCIPLE 5 Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. PRINCIPLE 6 Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.
- Dale Carnegie
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
Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.
- Bill Gates
I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.
- Oprah Winfrey
I think failure is nothing more than life’s way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating. Most people attach failure to something not working out or how people perceive you. This way, it is about answering to yourself.
- Sara Blakely
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
Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.
- John D. Rockefeller
I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I’m not an expert on how you get out of those things.
- Bill Gates
America’s leaders need to put their feet in the shoes of working Americans.
- Howard Schultz
I’m in a different position than most CEO’s. I’m a founder. I’m not a hired CEO. Now, I can be fired by the board, but most CEO’s are hired by the board.
- Howard Schultz
You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.
- Jeff Bezos
We bring together the best ideas – turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.
- Jack Welch
There’s a belief that you’re supposed to be poor, and suffering, and show your humility. I just don’t see the Bible that way. I see that God came and Jesus died so that we might live an abundant life and be a blessing to others.
- Joel Olsteen
The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
- Peter Thiel
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
Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.
- Zig Ziglar
Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker – whom I had hired to manage the store from TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen and I had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could alone. We pledges houses and property, everything we had.. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.
- Sam Walton
Management will endeavour to actively encourage staff to broaden their experiences and job knowledge for extensive application in the process of improving the Group’s operational and competitive performance. Combined with our strengths in both entrepreneurial spirit and managerial professionalism, this would result in the creation of a leading edge honed in a relentless drive for operational excellence in the Group’s future pursuits.
- Cheng Yu-tung
About HBO’s “Silicon Valley”: It’s a Good Show.
- Peter Thiel
When you start a company, it’s a singular focus. You have the wind at your back.
- Howard Schultz
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
- Timothy Ferriss
We can’t wait for Washington. Business leaders are going to have to galvanize their own constituencies and do everything they can to demonstrate confidence in the economy, and I think that can be contagious.
- Howard Schultz
I like sports, and I enjoy playing basketball and lifting weights.
- Joel Olsteen
Although we can’t predict the future, our orders for the first weeks of this quarter are in line with the expectations we discussed in our fourth quarter earnings call.
- John Chambers
Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurt his sense of importance and arouses resentment.
- Dale Carnegie
Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
- John F. Kennedy
In any new business, someone has to have a vision. You are as good as the people around you. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Identify your core community and go from there. Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to. In my experience it often takes as long as five years to make a business work. Partners can fail you. Staff may not execute properly. You could be too far ahead of the market. SO you have to be willing to hand in there and make it happen. From the founding of Phat Farm in 1992 until 1997, I lost money. By my account, I experienced $10 million in losses. But today Phat Farm is visible, it is imitated and it generates hundreds of millions of dollars. It took time, but good ideas often do need time to take off. Being an entrepreneur requires instinct, fortitude and the ability to accept that the world does not run on your schedule. Sometimes you just have to believe.
- Russell Simmons
I pay about a third in taxes, I give away about a third, and I follow the law.
- Ray Dalio
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
Philanthropy should be voluntary.
- Bill Gates
At an early age, my mother gave me this feeling that anything is possible, and I believe that.
- Howard Schultz
It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.
- Jeff Bezos
You can either endure the difficult or do the difficult.
- Michael Levine
Life is a classroom — only those who are willing to be lifelong learners will move to the head of the class.
- Zig Ziglar
I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there – a project a week.
- Seth Godin
What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!
- Larry Page
Dell’s a company that has changed the IT landscape in making PCs and servers more affordable. There’s enormous opportunities to make IT more accessible to tens of millions of companies, kind of democratizing the ability for companies to gain access to IT.
- Michael Dell
I think my story says that, when women are given the chance and the opportunity, that we can achieve a lot. We deliver.
- Sara Blakely
People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet – how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.
- Jeff Bezos
A half-billion-dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid-2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was possible, and Tesla played it perfectly.
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When you try to do something big its hard to fail completely.
- Timothy Ferriss
There is a time to provide advice and offer an opinion, and there is a time not to. Don’t be too quick to offer unsolicited advice. It certainly will not endear you to people.
- Harvey Mackay
Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.
- Ray Dalio
Every time I went on stage I was so terrified I almost threw up.
- Sara Blakely
The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing because you think you can only do a little.
- Zig Ziglar
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
The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios… The idea that you can actually predict what’s going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.
- George Soros
I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.
- Walt Disney
Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.
- Ben Horowitz
[Less than a week after founding the forerunner to Nike] I forgot to make it part of the original agreement, but I think it ought to be made explicit: There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.
- Phil Knight
The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.
- Winston Churchill
People who build family businesses are not classically trained. They have to deal with an enormous amount of politics. You think corporate politics are tough? Go work for your dad or your mom.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
This is a learning in the business life that first of all you need to have commitment, dedication and passion for what you are doing.
- Lakshmi Mittal
An optimist understands that life can be a bumpy road, but at least it is leading somewhere. They learn from mistakes and failures, and are not afraid to fail again.
- Harvey Mackay
Good talkers often choose to become sales professionals. Unfortunately, they don’t understand that selling well means listening well.
- Jerry Vass
I never lie, so if somebody asked me a question, I told them.
- Michael Bloomberg
Cruel and Darwinian? Try Fair and Effective.
- Jack Welch
Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
- Peter Drucker
Anyone with a Purpose Can Make a Difference.
- Zig Ziglar
