I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.
- Elon Musk
Notable Quotables
It’s true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.
- Peter Thiel
As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.
- Ben Horowitz
Be helpful. When you see a person without a smile, give him one of yours.
- Zig Ziglar
When you are tempted to get discouraged, remind yourself that according to God’s word, your future is getting brighter; you are on your way to a new level of glory. You may think you’ve got a long way to go, but you need to look back at how far you’ve already come. You may not be everything you want to be but atleast you can thank God that you’re not what you used to be.
- Joel Olsteen
Always go to the expert.
- Jack Nadel
If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I’ll tell you what you are.
- Dale Carnegie
I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.
- Jeff Bezos
The potential financial reward for building the ‘next Windows’ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.
- Bill Gates
I like to get people fired up, fill them with zeal for McDonald’s, and watch the results in their work.
- Ray Kroc
Competition and capitalism are opposites.
- Peter Thiel
Failure is part of discovering the problem you need to be working on. If, as an entrepreneur, you are afraid to fail or to admit the failure of your efforts, then you completely lose any chance at being able to adapt and succeed at finding the problem that needs solving.
- Caterina Fake
Danger: if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!
- Winston Churchill
In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
- Peter Thiel
I tell my employees that we’re in the service business, and it’s incidental that we fly airplanes.
- Herb Kelleher
All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.
- Walt Disney
People who add value to others do so intentionally. I say that because to add value, leaders must give of themselves, and that rarely occurs by accident.
- John C. Maxwell
You can learn from everybody.
- Sam Walton
A broad trend I’m completely obsessed with is mobile commerce. Like completely. I’m completely convinced that everybody’s going to be buying from their mobile devices. Whoever can claim that space or be in that space, I’m very interested in.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
It’s a lot cheaper to be a pirate than a pioneer.
- Tim Redmond
Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.
- Jack Welch
The Group also continues to be bullish for the long-term prospects for the property market in mainland China…
- Lee Shau Kee
The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.
- Warren Buffett
Wonder what your customer really wants? Ask. Don’t tell.
- Lisa Stone
After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.
- Steve Wozniak
What products in the marketplace are similar? Who else in the marketplace is doing this successfully? How big is the market?
- Jack Nadel
It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.
- Ronald Reagan
Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.
- Elon Musk
Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.
- Timothy Ferriss
To be a champion, you have to learn to handle stress and pressure. But if you’ve prepared mentally and physically, you don’t have to worry.
- Harvey Mackay
I was not naturally talented. I didn’t sing, dance or act, though working around that minor detail made me inventive.
- Steve Martin
Start where you are, with what you have. Make something of it and never be satisfied.
- George Washington Carver
One can get anything if he is willing to help enough others get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
Stop selling. Start helping.
- Zig Ziglar
A wise man is a confirmed optimist.
- Andrew Carnegie
I try to keep a positive intention and use whatever resources I have to benefit others. I try to create businesses that I think are not hurtful. I try to do things that I think are helpful to the environment, to the animals, and to the planet.
- Russell Simmons
For those already successful, money can become a controlling factor in life and make you a slave to it. One way to avoid that – Philanthropy.
- Lee Shau Kee
Don’t find fault, find a remedy.
- Henry Ford
The guerrilla is a cheapskate. She knows that every dollar allocated to marketing is essential, and she doesn’t plan to waste a penny. But she’s not foolish. When necessary, she hires the best designers, media planners, and experts in the business—she realizes that the best is often the cheapest in the end.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
Planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out.
- Peter Thiel
It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
- Paul Graham
I’d say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that’s a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.
- Herb Kelleher
It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
- Bill Gates
Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.
- Timothy Ferriss
I worked with many departments in China to organise a ‘One million farmer’ programme. The scheme trained them to learn professional skills.
- Lee Shau Kee
If you have enough push, you don’t have to worry about the pull.
- Zig Ziglar
The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
- Ralph Nader
I never hid my thoughts or feelings. During a business meeting I could get so emotionally charged and involved that I’d stammer out what others might consider to be outrageous things like, My six year old could do better than that! Or Don’t Walter Cronkite me!
- Solutions
If we do not have time to do it right the first time when will we have time to come back and do it right again later?
- Lee Cockerell
China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.
- Bill Gates
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
- Walt Disney
One of the most powerful forms of communication that affects a business is one over which you have little control (after the conversation has already begun): The communication from your existing customers to your potential customers. At CASHFLOW Technologies, Inc. we attribute a large part of our success to our customers telling other people about us. The power of this word-of-mouth advertising is immeasurable.
- Robert Kiyosaki
It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.
- Joel Olsteen
You need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970.
- Peter Thiel
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
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
A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.
- Ben Horowitz
We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.
- Bill Gates
Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.
- Zig Ziglar
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s absolutely true that unless you can instill discipline upon yourself, you will never be able to lead others.
- Zig Ziglar
The Chinese government still would like to see U.S. Internet companies explore the Chinese market, providing they are willing to abide by Chinese law. I think companies like Facebook should think about the Chinese market.
- Robin Li
I am an expert in Higher Level Math. You + God= Enough
- Zig Ziglar
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
- Henry Ford
To add value to others, one must first value others.
- John C. Maxwell
When you acknowledge God, He will go before you and make the crooked places straight.
- Joel Olsteen
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
- Ben Horowitz
Quoting from Chapter 2 of the Sayings Of Confucius, ‘At 30, I stood firm; at 40, I had no more doubts.’ Time has its role to play in one’s behavior and how one conducts himself in society. With the passage of time, we master our lives better and become more refined and polished, step by step. At the age of 30, one can overcome difficulties. By the age of 40, one has thorough appreciation of and insights into the world and becomes firmly self-assured without being carried away by all those irregularities in life.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Although DJ Clay may never sleep, all of his dreams come true!
- Blake Fraley
There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.
- Bill Gates
Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.
- Napoleon Hill
Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn’t really bother me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I’ve always leaned toward a feminine, funky style, even in business settings. I used to paint my nails blue in 1993, before it was mainstream.
- Sara Blakely
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
- Aristotle
You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.
- Napoleon Hill
If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: ‘Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?’ From what I’ve seen, it’s not likely.
- Timothy Ferriss
The freedom of the new kind of work (which most of us do, most of the time) is that the tasks are vague and difficult to measure. We can waste an hour surfing the ’Net because no one knows if surfing the ’Net is going to help us make progress or connections. This freedom is great, because it means no one is looking over your shoulder; no one is using a stopwatch on you. This freedom is a pox, because it’s an opening for the resistance. Freedom like this makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.
- Seth Godin
I am prepared to try anything once.
- Richard Branson
Always render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be.
- Og Mandino
We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.
- Bill Gates
Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.
- John C. Maxwell
You know, Saudi Arabia has a lot of poverty also. Regardless about what you hear about the viceroy and people being rich, et cetera.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
I have stated that a democracy is always two years behind the dictator.
- Winston Churchill
Smith never wavered. Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark owned Scott Paper outright and beat Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories.12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.
- James C. Collins
Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.
- Zig Ziglar
Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy. The other side of it is that you can’t cut enough costs to save your way to prosperity.
- Howard Schultz
My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she’s at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn’t think it would be fair; plus, they didn’t have any interest anyway.
- Howard Schultz
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
- Bill Gates
The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.
- Bill Gates
Sunseeker is well placed to take full advantage of opportunities in China, one of the world’s fastest growing luxury yacht markets.
- Wang Jianlin
There’s a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There’s a lot of sex, you know, in art. There’s a lot of naked women and men, and there’s intrigue, there’s fakery. It’s a real microcosm of the larger world.
- Steve Martin
I wasn’t satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement.
- Donald Trump
As bad as your situation may be, someone else always has it worse than you.
- George Foreman
Bill Gates was in his 20s when he started with $50,000 and became the richest man in the world with $90 billion. It’s a good idea that he did not ask too many people for their ideas on what they thought was possible for his life.
- Robert Kiyosaki
New customers are silver…loyal customers are gold.
- Anonymous
An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.
- Jack Welch
There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
- Bill Gates
I’m a genetic optimist.
- Jeff Bezos
If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.
- Winston Churchill
