The future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed.
- William Gibson
Notable Quotables
Some conflicts are simply territorial. For instance, I’ve rarely met a marketing person who wanted to raise prices and I’ve rarely met a finance person who wanted to lower prices.
- David Novak
All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.
- Peter Thiel
Exceptionally hard decisions can deplete your energy to the point at which you finally cave in. If you mentally crumble and degenerate into negative thinking, you’ll magnify the problem to the point where it can haunt you.
- John C. Maxwell
In the face of challenging economic and market conditions of the past 12 months, our diversified portfolio of multiple earnings streams has served us well.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Don’t worry about failure, you only have to be right once.
- Drew Houston
What one does easily, one does well.
- Andrew Carnegie
The stark differences between man and machine mean that gains from working with computers are much higher than gains from trade with other people. We don’t trade with computers any more than we trade with livestock or lamps. And that’s the point: computers are tools, not rivals.
- Peter Thiel
It’s the power of the brand. We’ve never formally advertised.
- Sara Blakely
When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.
- Larry Ellison
Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.
- Seth Godin
It’s absolutely true we set out to expose Microsoft’s covert activities, I feel very good about what we did … Maybe our investigation organization may have done things unsavory, but it’s not illegal. We got the truth out.
- Larry Ellison
We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth.
- Stephen Wynn
Honesty and integrity are absolutely essential for success in life – all areas of life. The really good news is that anyone can develop both honesty and integrity.
- Zig Ziglar
I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That’s where the fun is.
- Donald Trump
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
- Steve Jobs
The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.
- Winston Churchill
In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.
- Bill Gates
Value is achieved primarily through frontline employees who are satisfied, loyal, and productive, in part because of the high degree of capability they possess to deliver results to customers
- Service Profit Chain
About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.
- Reed Hastings
Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.
- Richard Branson
The future of advertising is the Internet.
- Bill Gates
Churchill was in the lavatory in the House of Commons and his secretary knocked on the door and said: Excuse me Prime Minister, but the Lord Privy Seal wishes to speak to you. After a pause Churchill replied: Tell His Lordship: I’m sealed on The Privy and can only deal with one shit at a time.
- Winston Churchill
If you think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself.
- Woodrow Wilson
Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.
- Ray Dalio
A joke is a very serious thing.
- Winston Churchill
I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.
- Walt Disney
Control your own destiny or someone else will.
- Jack Welch
It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.
- Winston Churchill
It is important for a husband to understand that his words have tremendous power in his wife’s life. He needs to bless her with words. She’s given her life to love and care for him, to partner with him, to create a family together, to nurture his children. If he is always finding fault in something she’s doing, always putting her down, he will reap horrendous problems in his marriage and in his life. Moreover, many women today are depressed and feel emotionally abused because their husbands do not bless them with their words. One of the leading causes of emotional breakdowns among married women is the fact that women do not feel valued. One of the main reasons for that deficiency is because husbands are willfully or unwittingly withholding the words of approval women so desperately desire. If you want to see God do wonders in your marriage, start praising your spouse. Start appreciating and encouraging her. Every single day, a husband should tell his wife, I love you. I appreciate you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” A wife should do the same for her husband. Your relationship would improve immensely if you’d simply start speaking kind, positive words, blessing your spouse instead of cursing him or her.
- Joel Olsteen
Character is to man what carbon is to steel.
- Napoleon Hill
If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary’s. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.
- Michael Bloomberg
I can’t imagine a day without coffee. I can’t imagine!
- Howard Schultz
We are not 100 percent there, but we are finding consensus.
- Jon Fredrik Baksaas
There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‘The government’s corrupt,’ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.
- Bill Gates
We must hang together or we will hang together.
- Benjamin Franklin
Of course, the challenge of being the initiator is that you’ll be wrong. You’ll pick the wrong thing, you’ll waste time, you’ll be blamed. This is why being an initiator is valuable. Most people shy away from the challenge. They’ve been too abused, they’re too fearful, they hold back, they’re happy to let someone else take the heat. Initiative is scarce. Hence valuable. Ditch digging is not scarce. It’s not hard at all to find manual labor at minimum wage, which is precisely why manual labor gets paid minimum wage. 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
The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you’ve ever been able to create before.
- Seth Godin
You give before you get.
- Napoleon Hill
What we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Brian Tracy
After Scour, I started a company called Red Swoosh. The idea was to take those litigants who sued us for a huge amount of money and turn them into customers with the same technology. I wanted to get them to pay me. It was a revenge business.
- Travis Kalanick
I think the move by Mr. Greenspan was welcomed by everyone here.
- Jack Welch
Be happy with who God made you to be, and quit wishing you were something different.
- Joel Olsteen
We want Google to be the third half of your brain.
- Sergey Brin
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
- Winston Churchill
I run a bunch of charities and I say this line to people: ‘I am somebody who has always been helped.’ A little thing like that can make people believe it.
- Russell Simmons
Connectors understand the necessity of creating value for others. If you want to be in the middle of the action, you must seek ways to enhance the lives of those surrounding you. The best connectors I know are extremely generous with introductions where they make sense. One of my favorite questions is, What are you most excited about right now? From that answer, I know who I can hook that person up with.
- Forbes
To me, we’re marketing hope.
- Joel Olsteen
Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.
- Rupert Murdoch
The only career worth pursuing is the one that turns your crank.
- Jack Welch
The thing that I’m going to focus on today is essentially the cloud that has been over Nike’s head over the last couple years.
- Phil Knight
To Admiral Cunningham it was against all tradition to abandon the Army in such a crisis. He declared, “It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.
- Winston Churchill
General and undifferentiated pitches don’t say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others.
- Peter Thiel
I didn’t like the way it looked in white trousers, and I couldn’t find anything to work underneath them.
- Sara Blakely
We are pleased to report the 33rd consecutive quarter of revenue and earnings growth. We are especially pleased with the balanced growth rate across almost all countries in both Europe and the Americas.
- John Chambers
A good idea is never lost. Even though its originator or possessor may die without publicizing it, it will someday be reborn in the mind of another….
- Thomas Edison
You cannot perform in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself.
- Zig Ziglar
I have always respected education, which is why I actually went back secretly and taught school for eight years.
- Steve Wozniak
Early must I rise. Leave now you must!
- Yoda
Enjoy the moment.
- Jack Dorsey
Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.
- John Chambers
The Government simply cannot make up their mind or they cannot get the prime minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful for impotency. And so we go on preparing more months more years precious perhaps vital for the greatness of Britain for the locusts to eat. – Speaking in the Address in Reply debate, after giving some specific instances of Germany’s war preparedness.
- Winston Churchill
Life really happens at intersections.
- Jack Dorsey
There was absolutely no consistency to the experience.
- Michael Gerber
Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
Cuando dos socios siempre están de acuerdo, uno de ellos no es necesario.
- Dale Carnegie
Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.
- Peter Thiel
True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.
- Zig Ziglar
If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick Over the Beehive.
- Dale Carnegie
You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
- Elon Musk
It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.
- Ben Horowitz
Anything you’re interested in the world – whether it be Charlie Rose or JetBlue or a public figure or your local coffee shop – they’re on Twitter and broadcasting what is interesting to them.
- Jack Dorsey
Ethics to me is very important.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
While a definitely optimistic future would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers.
- Peter Thiel
If you will focus on meeting other people’s needs, God will always make sure your needs are supplied. God will take care of your problems for you.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
- Jeff Bezos
A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.
- Peter Drucker
Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one.
- James C. Collins
Money is like manure, its only good if you spread it around.
- Winston Churchill
Keep the right perspective Some people would love to have your problems. They would gladly trade places with you. They would love to have the job that frustrates you. They would love to sit in traffic in that car you don’t like. They would love to have your husband, who gets on your nerves. They would love to live in the house you think is too small.
- Joel Olsteen
With the casino and the beds, our passengers will have at least two ways to get lucky on one of our flights.
- Richard Branson
Your margin is my opportunity.
- Jeff Bezos
The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals.
- Timothy Ferriss
And in urology, it could be drugs or devices for bladder and prostate problems.
- David Pyott
The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That’s approaching evil.
- Jeff Bezos
Churchill used words for different purposes: to argue for moral and political causes, to advocate courses of action in the social, national and international spheres, and to tell the story of his own life and that of Britain and its place in the world.
- Winston Churchill
We must restore the emotional relationship that people have to the idea of America, that no matter where you come from, no matter where you live, that you have access to the same opportunities that somebody who is born in privilege.
- Howard Schultz
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more things you’ll have to express gratitude for.
- Zig Ziglar
Most men go to their graves with their dreams still inside them.
- Zig Ziglar
A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.
- Peter Thiel
To succeed in business, you must build a brand and never destroy it.
- Aliko Dangote
At an early age, my mother gave me this feeling that anything is possible, and I believe that.
- Howard Schultz
When you start a company, it’s a singular focus. You have the wind at your back.
- Howard Schultz
When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.
- John C. Maxwell
Have you ever heard of Gmail? Ever used it? If so, it’s not because Gmail ran a lot of TV ads (they didn’t). It’s because the manifesto of free email got to you.
- Seth Godin
Does it make sense to go to college, or should I instead be a plumber?
- Michael Bloomberg
Apply the blacksmith’s homely principle when you are speaking. If you feel deeply about your subject you will be able to think of little else. Concentration is a process of distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say—fill your mind with your speech-material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears.
- Dale Carnegie
Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.
- Peter Thiel
