When people get at each other’s throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.
- Ray Dalio
Notable Quotables
Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker – whom I had hired to manage the store from TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen and I had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could alone. We pledges houses and property, everything we had.. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.
- Sam Walton
I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say what is and what is definitely not possible.
- Henry Ford
People are chasing cash, not happiness. When you chase money, you’re going to lose. You’re just going to. Even if you get the money, you’re not going to be happy.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
There will be no government that will be against business, so you can go ahead and invest.
- Aliko Dangote
I believe that God breathed life into every person and that every person is made in the image of God and you have accept them as they are, on their journey. I’m not here to preach hate or push people down.
- Joel Olsteen
Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
- Mark Twain
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
Watered-down feedback can be worse than no feedback at all because it’s deceptive and confusing to the recipient.
- Ben Horowitz
You can make positive deposits in your own economy every day by reading and listening to powerful, positive, life-changing content and by associating with encouraging and hope-building people.
- Zig Ziglar
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
War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It’s a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we’ve come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.
- Larry Page
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
- Winston Churchill
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
- William Arthur Ward
The one thing coaches cannot tolerate… is the individual who grows arrogant because he excelled at a lower level and believes he has nothing else to learn.
- Zig Ziglar
When I feel particularly tired at the end of the day, or when irritability proves that my nerves are tired, I know beyond question that it has been an inefficient day both as to quantity and quality.
- Dale Carnegie
The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.
- Napoleon Hill
If you always think about your dreams or goals, work steadfastly towards them and continue to challenge yourself, you will definitely be able to realise those dreams or goals.
- Tadashi Yanai
Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that – it’s hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate ’em.
- Ben Horowitz
Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl – no superior alternative has yet been found.
- Winston Churchill
Get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off of the bus.
- Jim Collins
Your network is your net worth.
- Porter Gale
None of Us is as Good as All of Us.
- Ray Kroc
God’s got you in the palm of His hand. You won’t leave one second before your time. If God wants you to be here, then you’re going to be here.
- Joel Olsteen
The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability… When the leader demonstrates vulnerability and sensibility and brings people together, the team wins.
- Howard Schultz
Nothing happens until something is sold.
- Joe Ricketts
If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
My little girls are the most beautiful women in the world. I am a lucky, lucky man. I will spend every day making sure that they know this.
- Russell Simmons
Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.
- Zig Ziglar
if you want to keep happiness , you have to share it !
- Dale Carnegie
Where did your art go while you were tweeting?
- Seth Godin
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
The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.
- Warren Buffett
Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!
- Steve Martin
In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.
- Mark Zuckerberg
It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
- Paul Graham
The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by.
- Seth Godin
Customers tend to avoid a restaurant that’s going aswamp in its own sludge.
- Ray Kroc
Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.
- Jack Welch
Making money from money is like aerobatics.
- Alisher Usmanov
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
- Bishop Desmond TuTu
Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.
- Dale Carnegie
Napoleon was criticized for giving toys” to war-hardened veterans, and Napoleon replied, Men are ruled by toys.
- Dale Carnegie
The successful leader must plan his work, and work his plan. A leader who moves by guesswork, without practical, definite plans, is comparable to a ship without a rudder. Sooner or later he will land on the rocks.
- Andrew Carnegie
Satisfied, loyal and repeat customers are at the heart of Walmart’s spectacular profit margins, and those customers are loyal to us because our associates treat them better than salespeople in other stores do. So, in the whole Wal-Mart scheme of things, the most important contact ever made is between the associated in the store and the customer. I didn’t catch on to that idea for quite a while. In fact, the biggest single regret in my whole business career is that we didn’t include our associates in the initial, managers-only profit-sharing plan when we took the company public in 1970. But there was nobody around preaching that philosophy in those days, and I guess I was just too worried about my own debt, and in too big a hurry to get somewhere fast. Today, some of our company’s critics would like everybody to believe we started our profit-sharing program and other benefits merely as away to stave off union organizing.
- Sam Walton
There’s plenty about God that I don’t understand and can’t explain. But I come back to my core belief that God is good, that He’s for us.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That’s what I’ve done in my career, one that’s culminated in – at least to this point – playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That’s the Bakken field, which I believe will yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come, maybe more.
- Harold Hamm
Success (a win) doesn’t make you, and failure (a loss) doesn’t make you.
- Zig Ziglar
Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
- Albert Einstein
Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best.
- John C. Maxwell
When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
- Thomas Edison
You can’t just let nature run wild.
- Walt Disney
Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Our goal is not to build a platform, it’s to be cross all of them.
- Mark Zuckerberg
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
- Winston Churchill
Don’t let what you don’t know scare you, because it can become your greatest asset. And if you do things without knowing how they have always been done, you’re guaranteed to do them differently.
- Sara Blakely
This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do.
- Joel Olsteen
I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.
- Steve Martin
Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
- Ben Horowitz
If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
- Timothy Ferriss
The most “successful” companies seemed to embrace a sort of anti-business model where they lost money as they grew.
- Peter Thiel
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
My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.
- Winston Churchill
Change is not threatening.
- Stephen Wynn
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
Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.
- Wang Jianlin
[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
Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.
- Timothy Ferriss
Our history is based on extending the brand to categories within the guardrails of Starbucks.
- Howard Schultz
Don’t be different just to be different. Be different to be better.
- Seth Godin
You create your own universe as you go along.
- 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
The first step is to establish that something is possible, then probability will occur.
- Elon Musk
I DECLARE I will experience God’s faithfulness. I will not worry. I will not doubt. I will keep my trust in Him, knowing that He will not fail me. I will give birth to every promise God put in my heart and I will become everything God created me to be. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m just always looking forwards. I spend very little time, looking backwards.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
It’s not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it’s a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.
- Elon Musk
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
Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you’re doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they’re hiding out in the comfortable zone. When your uncomfortable actions lead to success, the organization rewards you and brings you back for more.
- Seth Godin
Not only must you be an artist, must you be generous, and must you be able to see where you can help but you must also be aware. Aware of where your skills are welcomed.
- Seth Godin
Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.
- Jack Welch
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.
- Henry Ford
The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam – those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that’s legitimate.
- Bill Gates
Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage.
- Howard Schultz
If the terrorists have the sympathy of people, it’s much harder to find them. So we need people on our side, and that leads us to be responsible leaders of the world, show some concern with the problems.
- George Soros
Starting means you’re going to finish. If it doesn’t ship, you’ve failed. You haven’t poked the box if the box doesn’t realize it’s been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it’s merely a hobby.
- Seth Godin
Jobs and businesses are just vehicles to get you from where you are to where you want to be.
- Clay Clark
Love to learn—hate to be taught.
- Winston Churchill
I like definitive things.
- Jerry Seinfeld
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
Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else.
- Peter Thiel
When you set down the path to create art, whatever sort of art it is, understand that the path is neither short not easy. That means you must determine if the route is worth the effort. If it’s not, dream bigger.
- Seth Godin
Barring serious accidents, if you are not preoccupied with worry and you work hard, you can look forward to a reasonably lengthy existence…. Its not the hard work that kills, its the worrying that kills.
- Thomas Edison
We’re living in what I like to call the ‘Thank You Economy,’ because only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way – and do it authentically – are going to have a prayer of competing.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.
- Bill Gates
Take the first step in faith, you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
- Peter Thiel
When times are bad is when you want to build! Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost more?
- Ray Kroc
