Notable Quotables

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

- David Novak

So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.

- Dale Carnegie

“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it eventually, just do it and correct course along the way.

- Timothy Ferriss

Above all, you want to create something you’re proud of. This has always been my philosophy of business. I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive, then I believe you are better off not doing it.

- Richard Branson

Every pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, but every optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I am an expert in Higher Level Math. You + God= Enough

- Zig Ziglar

Owners don’t fire all the players. They fire the leader and bring in someone they hope the players will buy into.

- Napoleon Hill

What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I once asked General Eisenhower’s son, John, if his father ever nourished resentments. No,” he replied, Dad never wastes a minute thinking about people he doesn’t like.

- Dale Carnegie

In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China – execution is.

- Ma Huateng

should go out each day expecting good things, anticipating God’s blessings and favor. God has planned all of your days for good, not evil.

- Joel Olsteen

God created you to leave your mark on this generation. You have gifts and talents that you have not tapped into. There are new levels of your destiny still in front of you. But break out starts in your thinking. As you put these keys into action, making room for increase, expecting shifts of God’s favor, praying bold prayers, and keeping the right perspective, then God will release floods of His goodness that will thrust you beyond barriers of the past into the extraordinary life you were designed to live.

- Joel Olsteen

Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.

- Peter Thiel

I just think that – when a country needs more income and we do, we’re only taking in 15 percent of GDP, I mean, that – that – when a country needs more income, they should get it from the people that have it.

- Warren Buffett

My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world.

- Elon Musk

Don’t be afraid to assert yourself, have confidence in your abilities, and don’t let the bastards get you down.

- Michael Bloomberg

Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.

- Tadashi Yanai

A man who succeeds in life must sometimes go against the current.

- Ron Chernow

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

- Dale Carnegie

I always joke and say I want to invent a comfortable stiletto and then retire.

- Sara Blakely

I do not believe that people want to work hard enough and they want to find the quick Twitter, SEO. Anybody who’s obsessed with SEO has lost already, period. I believe that firmly.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?

- Jack Welch

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

- Jeff Bezos

It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

- Winston Churchill

Don’t settle in the land of barely enough. That is where you are, it is not who you are. That’s your location, it’s not your identity. No matter what it looks like, have an abundant mentality.

- Joel Olsteen

I don’t spend any time thinking about my place in history, ever. If people say I changed things, it’s nice, and I take it – but if I could give it to a charity it would be useful. I really believe now that my only job in life is to achieve a state of comfort and happiness.

- Russell Simmons

The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.

- Phil Knight

[Medco] had a different culture with respect to spending money. I believe health care demands that we be as frugal as possible and pay money for things that matter. We’re pretty frugal. Everybody has the same size offices. Everybody has the same size cube. There are no perks.

- George Paz

You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth.

- Winston Churchill

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

- Joel Olsteen

The main rule to me is to honor God with your life. To life a life of integrity. Not be selfish. You know, help others. But that’s really the essence of the Christian faith.

- Joel Olsteen

The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism.

- Peter Thiel

What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues. Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.

- John Chambers

This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.

- Peter Thiel

You can’t build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.

- Rupert Murdoch

Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.

- Colin Powell

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that

- Martin Luther King Jr.

You can’t have a mid-life crisis in the airline industry because every day is a crisis.

- Herb Kelleher

During the epidemic period of SARS, the Group purchased large quantities of disinfectant materials for donation to the local communities.

- Lee Shau Kee

As a group, we believe that education is extremely important for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. We spend heavily for the educations of our offspring.

- Thomas J Stanley

I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone in my life. Now I tell people–don’t tell anyone your idea until you have invested enough of yourself in it that you are not going to turn back. When a person has an idea at that conception moment, it is the most vulnerable–one negative comment could knock you off course.

- Sara Blakely

The bigger we get as a company, the more important it becomes for us to shift responsibility and authority toward the front lines, toward the department manager who’s stocking the shelves and talking to the customer. When we were much smaller, I probably wasn’t as quick to catch on to this idea as I do should have been. But as an avid student of management theory, back in the mid-seventies I started reading the work of W. Edwards Deming, the famous statistician who taught so much to the Japanese about improving their productivity and competitiveness.

- Sam Walton

I never did anything worth doing entirely by accident…. Almost none of my inventions were derived in that manner. They were achieved by having trained myself to be analytical and to endure and tolerate hard work.

- Thomas Edison

Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return; or, like the gentle Taft, will say: I don’t see how I could have done any differently from what I have.

- Dale Carnegie

We are consolidating our position as one of the leading technology companies in the automotive industry. Research and development expenditure of another 6 percent of our sales or around €2.1 billion is fueling our capacity for innovation. There are very few companies in the industry that are able to operate in these dimensions.

- Elmar Degenhart

It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot . .

- Zig Ziglar

We have an average household net worth of $3.7 million. Of course, some of our cohorts have accumulated much more. Nearly 6 percent have a net worth of over $10 million. Again, these people skew our average upward. The typical (median, or 50th percentile) millionaire household has a net worth of $1.6 million.

- Thomas J Stanley

I believe it’s important that we use names of endearment that reflect a special feeling for the individual involved.

- Zig Ziglar

From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.

- Thomas Edison

We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.

- Winston Churchill

My strength is programming. I also think my biggest strength is simplification. That’s what I love doing.

- Jack Dorsey

A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still.

- Dale Carnegie

The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

- Peter Thiel

On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better.

- Reed Hastings

I believe in that Old Chinese Proverb, When the student is willing, the teacher appears. But I would add, It also doesn’t hurt to be a little proactive about it.

- David Novak

Ability can take you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

- Zig Ziglar

There is no shame in taking pride in achievements or position. But nobody gets to the top alone.

- Harvey Mackay

The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.

- Ben Horowitz

And if I were the president, I’d go out there and I’d emphasize the things I have done, and I’d say, ‘Some things haven’t worked, and I’m sorry about that, but I keep trying.’ And I’m – and I think the president is a very viable candidate, and you’re going to have a real horse race here no matter who the Republican nominee is.

- Michael Bloomberg

es it’s thinner, but I wanted storage. I don’t have broadband at home, and you can’t get great broadband connection in hotels, so I carry all my personal media in the iPad. So I was hoping Apple has a 256GB iPad. I was hoping for more storage so I could put every episode of Big Bang Theory on my iPad. So I emailed my wife and said ‘nope, I don’t want one of those.

- Steve Wozniak

Taxes are not good things, but if you want services, somebody’s got to pay for them so they’re a necessary evil.

- Michael Bloomberg

Beverages have to be created. And they’re created by looking at what trend is in, say, the fashion industry – what color’s hot right now.

- Howard Schultz

It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.

- Seth Godin

Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping – they called it opportunity.

- Bill Gates

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.

- Peter Thiel

Chinese people, young people, they don’t go shopping a lot in department stores. All department store guys hate me. They say business is bad because of Jack.

- Jack Ma

Before success comes in any man’s life, he’s sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to quit. That’s exactly what the majority of men do.

- Napoleon Hill

Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I’d try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, ‘This is the end.’ I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.

- Rupert Murdoch

Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurt his sense of importance and arouses resentment.

- Dale Carnegie

Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.

- Santana

U.K. companies are in very international and very competitive markets. If you look at PC penetration in the U.K., it is very similar to the United States market.

- Bill Gates

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.

- Elon Musk

EVERYBODY SELLS Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.

- Peter Thiel

It is equally important that diversification is an ongoing process.

- Cheng Yu-tung

To integrate the new information into your existing network, you need to do three things: prioritize, organize and follow up on your contacts. You will follow your own inclinations, preferences and criteria for accomplishing each of these tasks, but the end result of your efforts should always be to strengthen, extend and enhance the effectiveness of your network of contacts.

- Ivan Misner

The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness.

- Peter Drucker

Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is–the strong horse that pulls the whole cart.

- Winston Churchill

I think if you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got to dream big and then dream bigger.

- Howard Schultz

But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.

- Peter Thiel

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win — you’re still a rat.

- Lily Tomlin

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

- Bill Gates

The people of Southwest have always been my pride, my joy and my love. Their indomitable dedication and esprit de corps have taken Southwest from a three-airplane dream to a 500-airplane reality.

- Herb Kelleher

Entrepreneurs must think in specifics with laser-like precision.

- Jack Nadel

The thing that’s confusing for investors is that founders don’t know how to be CEO. I didn’t know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don’t know how to be CEOs, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn. The question is… can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?

- Ben Horowitz

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

- Warren Buffett

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