If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.
- Zig Ziglar
Notable Quotables
Our customers call and e-mai us to say that’s how it feels when a Zappos box arrives. And that’s how we view this company.
- Tony Hsieh
But each country has to advance and move at its own speed.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.
- Peter Drucker
I have had problems when I have had money, and I have had problems when I haven’t had money. I have learned that if you are going to have problems, it’s better to have money.
- Zig Ziglar
Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.
- Winston Churchill
I think my whole life, because of where I came from, I had a fear of failure.
- Howard Schultz
A man may be poor; he may have nothing at all except his labour to sell; he may be a manual worker for a weekly wage, but in a free commonwealth he must enjoy as good a right as any lord, or prelate, or capitalist in the country to the integrity of his own political convictions.
- Winston Churchill
If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.
- Henry Ford
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Hope is the engine of your attitude, and your attitude determines your altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.
- Warren Buffett
Taking in a baseball game on TV is also a big treat.
- Jerry Seinfeld
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
After the decline in the past few years, the worst moment in the economy of Hong Kong is now behind us. The local property market is expected to show a steady upward trend as from this point.
- Lee Shau Kee
Husbands and wives, first be faithful to each other. Second, keep the romance going all of your life by courting each other every day.
- Zig Ziglar
Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
A great accomplishment shouldn’t be the end of the road, just the starting point for the next leap forward.
- Harvey Mackay
Opinions are the cheapest commodities on earth. Everyon has a flock of opinions ready to be wished upon anyone who will accept them. If you are influenced by opinions when you reach decisions you will not succeed in any undertaking, much less in that of transmuting YOUR OWN DESIRE into money…Close friends and relatives, while not meaning to do so, often handicap one through opinions and sometimes through ridicule, which is meant to be humorous. Thousands of men and women carry inferiority complexes with them all through life, because some well-meaning, but ignorant person destroyed their confidence through opinions or ridicule.
- Napoleon Hill
You don’t have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world.
- Jack Dorsey
Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.
- Winston Churchill
Despite the recent volatility of the stock market, economic and political confidence still prevails in Hong Kong.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Being educated in the United States gave me a good understanding of American culture. I think I got a lot of influence from the entrepreneurial mind in the United States.
- Masayoshi Son
Anybody can leverage celebrity for profit.
- Howard Schultz
Everyone has the potential to become an encourager. You don’t have to be rich. You don’t have to be a genius. You don’t have to have it all together. All you have to do is care about people and initiate.
- John C. Maxwell
Law of Clarity – If you can’t explain what you sell to a ten-year old child then you don’t know what you sell.
- Jerry Vass
The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.
- Napoleon Hill
We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.
- Winston Churchill
Unhappy Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit three days before Amazon’s IPO, claiming that Amazon was unfairly calling itself a “bookstore” when really it was a “book broker”.
- Peter Thiel
One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.
- Ben Horowitz
What I would say to young entrepreneurs is there’s so many moments in your life where you have these dreams, and people are trying to protect you, and they say, perhaps, friends, family, parents sometimes, they don’t agree with it, they think, ‘This is just too high of a hurdle.’ And I don’t agree with that.
- Howard Schultz
You know, the diversity that America has is so special. It’s starting to really become a cool thing for young people.
- Russell Simmons
The Chinese people have always been determined to forge ahead.
- Cheng Yu-tung
[On becoming in 1969 a full-time employee of his five year old company] There were nervous moments. Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Knight guarantee liabilities to the tune of $300,000,’ Penny’d say, ‘We don’t have $300,000.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t care. Just sign the thing.’
- Phil Knight
Personally, I just hope they (the LA Lakers) suck forever.
- Mark Cuban
While 9:00 to 5:00 and what happens in the job is important… what happens from 5:00 – 9:00 while you’re off the job is INFINITELY more important.
- Zig Ziglar
Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon. Sorry I’m all out of cards. Boy, does your country ever eat up business cards.
- Phil Knight
Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose…
- Thomas Edison
True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.
- Zig Ziglar
Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.
- Bill Gates
If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.
- Elon Musk
With our feet to the fire, we needed to produce, in the course of the deal we figured out how to buy, how to sell, and how to finance a transaction.
- Jack Nadel
No slovenly, careless person can become a successful leader. Leadership calls for respect. Followers will not respect a leader who does not grade high on all of the factors of a Pleasing Personality.
- Napoleon Hill
We have to get control of our borders. You can only do that if you make companies obey the law and not hire undocumented or illegals. They can only do that is if they have a Social Security Card that has biometrics so they know whether the person is legal or not.
- Michael Bloomberg
It it impossible to comprehend Rockefeller’s breathtaking ascent without realizing that he always moved into battle backed by adundant cash. Whether riding out downturns or coasting on booms, he kept plentiful reserves and won many bidding contests simply because his war chest was deeper. Rockefeller vividly described the way he had hastily enlisted the aid of bankers to snap up one rifinery: It required many hundreds of thousands of dollars and in cash, securities would not answer. I received the message at about noon, and had to get off on the 3 o’clock train. I drove from bank to bank asking each president or cashier, whomever I could find first, to get ready for me all the funds he could possibly lay hands on. I told them I would be back to get the money later. I rounded up all of our banks in the city, and made a secondary journey to get the money, and kept going until I secured the necessary amount. With this I was off on the 3 o’clock train and closed the transaction.
- Ron Chernow
NO PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OR EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK PROCESS Your company now employs twenty-five people and you know that you should formalize the performance management process, but you don’t want to pay the price. You worry that doing so will make it feel like a “big company.” Moreover, you do not want your employees to be offended by the feedback, because you can’t afford to lose anyone right now. And people are happy, so why rock the boat? Why not take on a little management debt? The first noticeable payments will be due when somebody performs below expectations: CEO: “He was good when we hired him; what happened?” Manager: “He’s not doing the things that we need him to do.” CEO: “Did we clearly tell him that?” Manager: “Maybe not clearly . . .” However, the larger payment will be a silent tax. Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.
- Ben Horowitz
God’s desire is that we excel.
- Joel Olsteen
If you give people tools, [and they use] their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.
- Bill Gates
Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.
- Steve Ballmer
We survive the market volatility and political changes. We cater for the actual need of the people and keep pace with the country.
- Cheng Yu-tung
No one ever wants to see his or her name linked to anything bad. Conscience is like a baby. It has to go to sleep before you can.
- Harvey Mackay
Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.
- Ben Horowitz
While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.
- Ray Kroc
It’s a lot cheaper to be a pirate than a pioneer.
- Tim Redmond
What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people – ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.
- Larry Ellison
If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason.
- Timothy Ferriss
Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.
- John D. Rockefeller
The object of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater.
- Seth Godin
Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.
- John D. Rockefeller
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
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
- Bill Gates
I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.
- Richard Branson
I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.
- Sam Walton
Effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information. Little is worse than a manager who can’t cut bait.
- Jack Welch
The most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of the civilization without its mercy.
- Winston Churchill
There is a good chance India may become our largest total sales market in the whole of Asia.
- John Chambers
Don’t solicit feedback on your product, your idea, or your business just for validation purposes. Be really careful about that. You want to tell the people that can help move your idea forward. But if you’re just looking to your friend, coworker, husband, wife, for validation, be careful. Because out of love… a lot of people will express some concerns, and it can stop a lot of multi-million dollar ideas right in their tracks.
- Sara Blakely
But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.
- Jeff Bezos
This is indicative of how quickly CEO caution can put the foot on the brake.
- John Chambers
When you marry operating excellence with innovation, you multiply the value of your creativity.
- James C. Collins
What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question, and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at the very least handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open as they will. Read on from the first sentence that turns the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
- Winston Churchill
It was the right thing to do.
- Phil Knight
No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle.
- Winston Churchill
The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.
- Ray Kroc
We can never learn too much of His will towards us, too much of His messages and His advice. The Bible is His word and its study gives at once the foundation for our faith and an inspiration to battle onward in the fight against the tempter.
- John D. Rockefeller
You’ve got to embrace what you don’t know.
- Sara Blakely
My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.
- Larry Page
Assetts put money in your pocket. Liabilities take money out of your pocket.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I think that business book reporting, it’s all Jim Collins, it’s the story of victory; it’s success bias over and over again.
- Ben Horowitz
If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.
- Elon Musk
Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.
- Howard Schultz
When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don’t read much anymore.
- Steve Martin
Always have something to say. The man who has something to say and who is known never to speak unless he has, is sure to be listened to.
- Dale Carnegie
Last year my wife got a Rolls-Royce.
- Russell Simmons
When you simplify… When you get down to the essence, you fix so many things.
- Jack Dorsey
While the uncertainties that the economic climate holds are a challenge for all companies, we are confident that by drawing from the strengths of our people, as well as on our core values of quality, initiative, trust and creativity, we will maintain our focus and strategic direction.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.
- Ray Kroc
The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.
- Elon Musk
Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.
- Thomas Edison
It says in Romans 5:17, We are to reign in life as kings.” When God looks at us He doesn’t see us defeated, barely getting by, or just taking the leftover positions. Not at all. God sees you as a king. He sees you as a queen. You have His royal blood flowing through your veins. You and I are supposed to reign in life. Do you know what that word reign means? It means, time in power.” God said we’re to reign how long? In life. That means as long as you’re alive that is your time in power. You don’t have a two-year term like a mayor, a four-year term like a president. Your term is to reign every single day, to be victorious, to rise to new levels, to accomplish great things.
- Joel Olsteen
Legacy is greater than currency.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
When you supervise something, it is one thing. When you are in the middle of something, there is a different pace of life.
- Vladimir Potanin
Poke the box How do computer programmers learn their art? Is there a step-by-step process that guarantees you’ll get good? All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer or it might be your boss. It’s a puzzle, one that can be solved in only one way—by poking.
- Seth Godin
Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.
- John D. Rockefeller
If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
- Jeff Bezos
Keep thy heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life’ (Prov. 4:23 KJV).
- Joel Olsteen
Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
- Timothy Ferriss
I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.
- Joel Olsteen
It’s quite complicated and sounds circular, but we’ve worked out a way of calculate a Web site’s importance.
- Larry Page
Leaders don’t rise to the pinnacle of success without developing the right set of attitudes and habits, they make every day a masterpiece.
- John C. Maxwell
