Notable Quotables

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.

- Walt Disney

I did not like the way I looked in a pair of white pants.

- Sara Blakely

Forty-five years ago, when I was 18, I came to San Francisco by boat and took two weeks to get here. I had a great impression. I think San Francisco is the welcoming gate for people from Asia.

- Tadashi Yanai

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

- Henry Ford

In Hong Kong, the property business has always been very competitive, so we have to think of ways to get an edge over our competitors.

- Raymond Kwok

I don’t want any more concentration camps for animals that are cruelly treated, force-fed to fatten themselves up for our consumption.

- Stephen Wynn

All companies of any size have to continue to push to make sure you get the right leaders, the right team, the right people to be fast acting, and fast moving in the marketplace. We’ve got great leaders, and we continue to attract and promote great new leaders.

- Steve Ballmer

When I hear Mitt Romney say that he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, raised from the dead, that He’s his savior – that’s good enough for me.

- Joel Olsteen

Don’t treat your customers like a bunch of purses and wallets.

- Chris Brogan

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we will fall, but ‘when.’ There are no exceptions.

- John C. Maxwell

We subpoenaed him for the SAP trial and he was on the lam. The HP board sent him to Bolivia to talk to customers. Then they sent him to Mongolia to talk to customers, just out of reach of the federal subpoenas … the board figured out [later]: we should have left Leo in Mongolia.

- Larry Ellison

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Even though I’m a hype man myself, I like the practicality of it all. People who understand how to turn a profit. At the end of the day, this is still business so I’m looking for real practical knowledge of how to actually make money, not necessarily raise it.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I always wanted to find oil. It was always an irresistible calling.

- Harold Hamm

I was afraid of the internet… because I couldn’t type.

- Jack Welch

Nobody walks this earth thinking he’s better than I think I am – I think I’m great. At the same time, it’s so obvious to me that I’m nobody.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Stopped they must be; on this all depends. Only a fully-trained Jedi Knight, with the Force as his ally, will conquer Vader and his Emperor.

- Yoda

Performance of the local property leasing market showed gradual improvement, particularly with demand rising substantially for the leasing of grade A as well as grad B office properties, and part of these properties registered an increase of over 50% as compared to the level as at the end of last year.

- Lee Shau Kee

In fact, stories only magnify the need to have something remarkable (and honest) to say.

- Seth Godin

If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.

- Jack Welch

Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.

- Jack Welch

Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.

- Timothy Ferriss

I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.

- Warren Buffett

When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.

- Ben Horowitz

One definition of hope is happy anticipation of something good.

- Joel Olsteen

The uncertainty and importance of the present reduce the past and future to comparative insignificance, and clear the mind of minor worries. And when all is over, memories remain which few men do not hold precious.

- Winston Churchill

Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.

- W. Clement Stone

Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors—maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother’s recipe—your business is unlikely to survive.

- Peter Thiel

The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.

- Debbi Fields

It’s Almost Impossible to Overinvest in Becoming the Market Leader.

- Seth Godin

Focus on your people – Without employees and customers, your’re going nowwhere.

- David Green

Most men go to their graves with their dreams still inside them.

- Zig Ziglar

It has been almost a decade since the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. Hong Kong has gone through both good times and bad times. During the past decade, Hong Kong has undoubtedly played an increasingly important role in the economic development of China.

- Cheng Yu-tung

With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.

- Seth Godin

The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. There is an important.

- James C. Collins

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

- Winston Churchill

We’ll see how that evolves. Obviously, it doesn’t mean we’ll just be willing to do anything that’s requested of us.

- Sergey Brin

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

- Peter Drucker

The more you talk about negative things in your life, the more you call them in. Speak victory not defeat.

- Joel Olsteen

Watered-down feedback can be worse than no feedback at all because it’s deceptive and confusing to the recipient.

- Ben Horowitz

Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.

- Zig Ziglar

It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through.

- Zig Ziglar

We had been kicked out of one bank… The second, it was touch and go…

- Phil Knight

The recovering economic environment will lead to an increase in local demand for home purchases and the purchasing power which has accumulated in the past two years due to uncertainty surrounding the local economy will result in increased demand for residential properties, particularly for residential units of small to medium size which match well with your [Henderson] Group’s property development focus.

- Lee Shau Kee

All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.

- Donald Trump

Over the course of your career, your Detroit will surely call you at one point or another. If you can go, that’s great. If you can’t, make peace with the reasons why.

- Jack Welch

Look – this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do – ultimately, you’re at the end.

- Ben Horowitz

A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.

- George Soros

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

Sometimes, we’re so focused on being consistent that we also lower the bar on amazing.

- Seth Godin

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.

- Henry Ford

Failing is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night.

- Zig Ziglar

Anyone who has held an iDevice or a smoothly machined MacBook has felt the result of Steve Jobs’s obsession with visual and experiential perfection. But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively.

- Peter Thiel

Opportunity does not knock, it presents itself when you beat down the door.

- Kyle Chandler

It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.

- Robert Kiyosaki

If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

- James C. Collins

Hong Kong has remained a strong financial centre. It has a solid business environment and geographically, it is well located, being next to China. During this time, there is no city that can match it.

- Lee Shau Kee

How do leaders serve their people? They may pay good wages and treat employees with respect.

- John C. Maxwell

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

I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.

- Howard Schultz

It takes a decade to grow trees but a century to nurture human beings.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Continually get the word out about how you’re handling the situation.

- David Novak

Specifically, the following things that cause no trouble when you are small become big challenges as you grow: Communication Common knowledge Decision making.

- Ben Horowitz

We know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition.

- Peter Thiel

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

- Dale Carnegie

For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.

- James C. Collins

Shaw once remarked: If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.

- Dale Carnegie

When you are tempted to get discouraged, remind yourself that according to God’s word, your future is getting brighter; you are on your way to a new level of glory. You may think you’ve got a long way to go, but you need to look back at how far you’ve already come. You may not be everything you want to be but atleast you can thank God that you’re not what you used to be.

- Joel Olsteen

Everybody starts with creating or acquiring certain property in order to create the material to work with. When we started our business, we thought first of all about development, how to grow, and we managed to do this, even with all the difficulties and all the difficult rules that were implemented in Russia at that time.

- Vladimir Potanin

About two-thirds of us work between forty-five and fifty-five hours per week.

- Thomas J Stanley

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

- Dale Carnegie

You always have to give something when you get something.

- Jack Nadel

Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?

- Ray Kroc

It’s been a long career, and I’ve made some mistakes along the way.

- Rupert Murdoch

You reinforce the behaviors that you reward, he explained. If you reward candor, you’ll get it.

- Jack Welch

Several families interviewed for this book recommended the oldest persuasive tool known to man: bribery. Each child is given some amounts of virtual cash, 25-30 cents, for each hour of good behaviour. The same amount is subtracted from their accounts for breaking the rules. All purchases for fun – whether souvenirs, ice cream, or otherwise – come out of their own individual accounts. No balance, no goodies. This often requires more self-control on the part of the parents than the children.

- Timothy Ferriss

People with the right kind of ambition would not likely use the word play to describe their effort to work as a team to build something substantial. Finally, people who use the “me” prism find it natural and obvious to speak in terms of “building out my résumé” while people who use the “team” prism find such phrases to be somewhat uncomfortable and awkward, because they clearly indicate an individual goal that is separate from the team goal.

- Ben Horowitz

Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

- Peter Thiel

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

The dreams and passions stored within hearts are powerful keys which can unlock a wealth of potential.

- John C. Maxwell

If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth

- Ray Kroc

Our improvement and innovative ideas have never been hindered by our proven record, which instead has paved the way for determined, practical development and new directions.

- Cheng Yu-tung

And the pathetic part of it is that frequently those who have the least justification for a feeling of achievement bolster up their egos by a show of tumult and conceit which is truly nauseating. As Shakespeare put it: … man, proud man, / Drest in a little brief authority, / … Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the angels weep.

- Dale Carnegie

Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can’t be too worried about what they’re told at their country clubs.

- Rupert Murdoch

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