Notable Quotables

One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.

- Bruce Lee

In the years to come, that lure of partnership helped us attract a lot of good managers, but I don’t believe that we ever had one who bought more stock than Willard. And of course he feels pretty good about it today. – Sam Walton (on human resources, hiring, early history of Wal-Mart)

- Sam Walton

I DECLARE I will live victoriously. I was created in the image of God. I have the DNA of a winner. I am wearing a crown of favor. Royal blood flows through my veins. I am the head, never the tail, above never beneath. I will live with purpose, passion, and praise, knowing that I was destined to live in victory. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.

- Seth Godin

Digital reading will completely take over. It’s lightweight and it’s fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.

- Bill Gates

My biggest wish is for government, the private sector and all of us to work together to make the Philippines the best tourism destination in Southeast Asia.

- Henry Sy

To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.

- Joel Olsteen

Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.

- Peter Thiel

What we’ve gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question ‘Can we trust Microsoft?’

- Steve Ballmer

Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make.

- Peter Thiel

As the economy shifts, large (and small) organizations are discovering that this brainwashing thing was a huge error. You can’t snooze your way to greatness. You can’t optimize your way to surprising growth. You can’t organize your way into blamelessness.

- Seth Godin

There’s pros and cons of a big church. Cons is I don’t get to know everybody, I don’t get to go to their ballgame, I don’t get to marry everybody, but the pros are you get all this community, 800 ushers come in to serve, getting there at 7 in the morning on their day off and coming in on Saturday to make all those wafers.

- Joel Olsteen

I encourage active skepticism – when people are being skeptical because they’re trying to identify the best course of action. They’re trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.

- Timothy Ferriss

We’ve seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we’re seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.

- Sergey Brin

Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: ‘I may be wrong. Let’s examine the facts.

- Dale Carnegie

Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.

- Bill Gates

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

The commonsense rules of the real world” are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.

- Timothy Ferriss

A productive employee who is kept busy working at his or her job is far more likely to be happy at that job and less likely to look for employment elsewhere.

- Zig Ziglar

I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along with it.

- Walt Disney

There’s very little advice in men’s magazines, because men don’t think there’s a lot they don’t know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, ‘I know what I’m doing, just show me somebody naked.’

- Jerry Seinfeld

Tip 49 – The trip to success should be as much fun as arriving at the destination.

- Jack Nadel

Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.

- Peter Drucker

Most of us have never felt at a disadvantage because we did not receive any inheritance. About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent.

- Thomas J Stanley

Some libertarians say, ‘Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.’ But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn’t earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.

- Ben Horowitz

In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.

- Reed Hastings

My natural inclination to be improv rather than an educated character serves me well.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Play like you’re ten points behind in the final quarter. I’ve always heard this defined as operational cadence – creating a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of doing business that drives the relentless pursuit of results. Whatever I’ve learned about creating a sense of urgency started when I worked for Howard Davis at Tracy Locke. He really knew how to push people. Everything had to be done yesterday. And I was one of the people who go pushed. Howard was a master of intimidation. Everyone knew if you didn’t give him what he wanted, he was going to find another way to get it, and if your weren’t part of the solution then you were part of the problem. The clients loved Howard because they knew he’d kill for them (and none of us wanted to be killed). It wasn’t always comfortable, but it taught me the value of constantly putting pressure on myself and the people who work for me. In corporate America, pressure is a way of life, so rather that resist it or merely accept it, you have to learn to use it as a personal motivator.

- David Novak

I am a fifty-seven-year-old male, married with three children. About 70 percent of us earn 80 percent or more of our household’s income.

- Thomas J Stanley

It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

- Ronald Reagan

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

- Bill Gates

You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.

- Lee Iacocca

Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.

- Oprah Winfrey

Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books—those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock—also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world’s general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company’s scaling strategy.

- Peter Thiel

The Apple Stores’ sleek minimalist design and close control over the consumer experience, the omnipresent advertising campaigns, the price positioning as a maker of premium goods, and the lingering nimbus of Steve Jobs’s personal charisma all contribute to a perception that Apple offers products so good as to constitute a category of their own.

- Peter Thiel

I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.

- Larry Ellison

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?

- Winston Churchill

This is why so many small and medium-sized businesses don’t use tools that bigger firms take for granted. It’s not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don’t exist: distribution is the hidden bottleneck.

- Peter Thiel

Transparency is terribly important in a situation like this, as a quick reaction time, because news today is not immediate. It travels globally on the Internet. In our YouTube culture, dramatic videos take on a life of their own, beyond anyone’s control. – (on crisis management)

- David Novak

To do the most good requires saying no to pressures to stray, and the discipline to stop doing what does not fit.

- Peter Drucker

I’m skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education…. People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it’s very unclear how viable they are in many cases.

- Peter Thiel

The first three-and-a-half months of calendar year 2001 have been extremely challenging for many of us in high-tech.

- John Chambers

Wally Amos is the classic example of a man who gets up again and again.

- Zig Ziglar

Market the change; be bold. Remember don’t be a bad ad, be a good one.

- David Novak

Building a better you is the first step to building a better America.

- Zig Ziglar

But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.

- Peter Thiel

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

- Mark Zuckerberg

My job is to help more people have jobs.

- Jack Ma

God will always bring the right people into your life, but you have to let the wrong people walk away.

- Joel Olsteen

That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.

- Ben Horowitz

The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.

- Jeff Bezos

The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.

- Herb Kelleher

Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.

- Jack Ma

My first professional job was to sell heavy-duty waterless cookware.

- Zig Ziglar

We often hear military experts inculcate the doctrine of giving priority to the decisive theatre. There is a lot in this. But in war this principle, like all others, is governed by facts and circumstances; otherwise strategy would be too easy. It would become a drill-book and not an art; it would depend upon rules and not on an instructed and fortunate judgment of the proportions of an ever-changing scene.

- Winston Churchill

You know the funny thing, I don’t get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.

- Donald Trump

If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.

- Peter Thiel

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

- Winston Churchill

Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has incredible impact.

- Bill Gates

Make sure your ego lies in the performance of the company, not in the performance of the stock.

- Warren Buffett

There was joy in getting his blood pressure down . . . joy in climbing Mount Everest . . . joy in reaching the summits of six more of the world’s highest mountains . . . joy in building a profitable company providing houses that people could turn into homes . . . joy in learning to fly. But he will also tell you there has been no joy as great as giving from what God has blessed him with so that he might bless and serve others. That’s the true and ultimate purpose of setting and reaching goals.

- Zig Ziglar

There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.

- Dale Carnegie

Self-discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think you can’t control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.

- Napoleon Hill

Don’t waste your energy trying to convince people to understand you. Your time is too valuable to try to prove yourself to people.

- Joel Olsteen

Manufacture, don’t just trade. There’s money in manufacturing even though it is capital intensive.

- Aliko Dangote

Managing a business, small or large, today requires an extremely disciplined, thoughtful approach with regard to the pressure that people are under.

- Howard Schultz

If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will.

- Donald Trump

I love making something complex. I love taking everything away, taking all the debris, the conceptual debris from a technology away so that you can just focus on what’s most important.

- Jack Dorsey

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

- Bill Gates

It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

- Ben Horowitz

One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it’s making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it’s the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you’re dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.

- Reid Hoffman

I have a list of the hardest, most challenging problems that our company needs to solve and I start at the top and work my way down. And I have a list of the coolest most fascinating things that we can invent and I start at the top of the list and I work my way down.

- Travis Kalanick

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

But at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

- Winston Churchill

We are witnessing a seismic change in consumer behavior. That change is being brought about by technology and the access people have to information.

- Howard Schultz

On John D. Rockefeller and the ideal entrepreneur: He embodied all its virtues of thrift, self-reliance, hard work, and unflagging enterprise.

- Ron Chernow

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

- Bill Gates

Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.

- Oprah Winfrey

When I was a kid a long time ago, when the sun rose, I was outside on my bike. If my parents were lucky – poor parents! – I would be home before it got dark.

- Larry Ellison

Most People have a desire to look for the exception instead of the desire to become exceptional.

- John C. Maxwell

Of course people are getting smarter nowadays, they are letting lawyers instead of their conscience be their guides.

- Will Rogers

People shouldn’t have to spend a lot of money to get high-quality clothing.

- Tadashi Yanai

A man must choose his own way of life, and…it is only by following out one’s own bent that there can be the really harmonious life.

- Winston Churchill

The successful leader must be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of his followers. If he tries to shift this responsibility he will not remain the leader. If one of his followers makes a mistake or proves to be incompetent, the leader must consider that it is he who failed.

- Napoleon Hill

There is no accountability today… no willingness to focus on big ideas.

- Michael Bloomberg

A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren’t dependent on Washington doing something different.

- Bill Gates

Eventually you won’t think of ‘the Internet business.’ You’ll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn’t clear.

- Bill Gates

For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.

- Joel Olsteen

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