Notable Quotables

Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.

- Ben Horowitz

Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.

- Zig Ziglar

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

- Ronald Reagan

All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory’ was the motto of the King’s Guard in ancient Greece.

- Dale Carnegie

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

- Warren Buffett

If salespeople don’t probe well for background information, they don’t know how to launch the presentation.

- Jerry Vass

I thought ‘Borat’ was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn’t some studio-produced script with 14 writers.

- Steve Martin

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t.

- Ben Horowitz

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

- Thomas Edison

Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.

- Seth Godin

What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question, and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at the very least handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open as they will. Read on from the first sentence that turns the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

- Winston Churchill

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Once you’ve engaged with an organization or a relationship or a community, you owe it to your team to start. To initiate. To be the one who makes something happen. To do less is to steal from them. If you hide your spark, bury your ideas, keep your questions and notions from the team, you have hurt them as badly as if you had stolen a laptop and fenced it on eBay.

- Seth Godin

Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. …

- Dale Carnegie

The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.

- Peter Drucker

Whenever you are speaking, both your passion for your business and your appearance will have a lasting impact on your audience.

- Robert Kiyosaki

I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.

- Bill Gates

We were pretty schizophrenic. We were going to take on the world, but we couldn’t make payroll.

- Phil Knight

If your business is not a brand, it is just a commodity.

- Donald Trump

It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.

- Napoleon Hill

The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don’t know.

- Seth Godin

Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.

- Ben Horowitz

Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.

- Phil Knight

If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.

- Oprah Winfrey

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

- Howard Schultz

I’m not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.

- Steve Ballmer

Most often I am only interested in an idea if it’s going to get hundreds of millions of users. That’s the scale that I am always trying to play to.

- Reid Hoffman

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

- Winston Churchill

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival. But I take my task with buoyancy and hope. Come, then, let us go forward with our united strenght.

- Winston Churchill

Mrs. Carnegie and I had dinner at a friend’s house in Chicago. While carving the meat, he did something wrong. I didn’t notice it; and I wouldn’t have cared even if I had noticed it. But his wife saw it and jumped down his throat right in front of us. John,” she cried, watch what you are doing! Can’t you ever learn to serve properly!” Then she said to us: He is always making mistakes. He just doesn’t try.” Maybe he didn’t try to carve; but I certainly give him credit for trying to live with her for twenty years. Frankly, I would rather have eaten a couple of hot dogs with mustard—in an atmosphere of peace—than to have dined on Peking duck and shark fins while listening to her scolding.

- Dale Carnegie

The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things.

- Ben Horowitz

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

Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

- John D. Rockefeller

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

- Helen Keller

You will have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

Your workforce is your most valuable asset. The knowledge and skills they have represent the fuel that drives the engine of business – and you can leverage that knowledge.

- Harvey Mackay

You cannot climb the ladder of success dressed in the costume of failure.

- Zig Ziglar

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

- John C. Maxwell

Think of yourself as on the threshold of unparalleled success. A whole, clear, glorious life lies before you. Achieve! Achieve!

- Andrew Carnegie

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

- Seth Godin

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

- Mark Twain

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’

- Jeff Bezos

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

- Mark Zuckerberg

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel

Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.

- Seth Godin

We don’t have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.

- Larry Page

As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.

- John C. Maxwell

The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds like the worst. It sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I’d be super-duper bored. I like high intensity.

- Elon Musk

[On Twitter and Japan] We’ve had massive success in Japan… In Japan, it’s not 140 characters, it’s 140 words. So you could write a little mini-novel. This is a whole story in the universe.

- Jack Dorsey

Every morning when I wake up, I make up my mind to solve as many problems before returning home.

- Aliko Dangote

Applied Faith – Faith is a state of mind through which your aims, desires, plans and purposes may be translated into their physical or financial equivalent.

- Napoleon Hill

I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

- Elon Musk

I was not strong enough to defeat him. Like his master before him, be destroyed, he must.

- Yoda

The warrior mentality, the very fight to survive, is truly what created our culture.

- Herb Kelleher

Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.

- Ben Horowitz

The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.

- Seth Godin

Send out a cheerful, positive greeting, and most of the time you will get back a cheerful, positive greeting. It’s also true that if you send out a negative greeting, you will, in most cases, get back a negative greeting.

- Zig Ziglar

One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

- Richard Branson

The austerity policies for the mainland property market will remain intact in 2011.

- Lee Shau Kee

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years of trying to get other people interested in you.

- Dale Carnegie

Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

- John Wooden

You can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my own.

- Ron Chernow

Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that’s fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.

- Bryan Adams

By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer.

- Bill Gates

If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.

- Peter Thiel

Doing a mall is not only construction of the physical place, what’s important is the merchandising mix.

- Henry Sy

Don’t make excuses, don’t blame the past. The rest of your life can be the best of your life!

- Joel Olsteen

I’m going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.

- Joel Olsteen

The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.

- Joel Olsteen

I produced Run DMC. I produced some early records, lots of records early on.

- Russell Simmons

Japan’s biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.

- Tadashi Yanai

Most GE business leaders now have digital cockpits on their computer screens that update in real time all the important data to help them manager their businesses.

- Jack Welch

So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.

- Thomas Edison

True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

- Helen Keller

It’s true that charisma can make a person stand out for a moment, but character sets a person apart for a lifetime.

- John C. Maxwell

We can consider 140 characters to be the full story, but it’s not. It’s just a caption. A headline for something broader.

- Jack Dorsey

I believe the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master of that line.

- Andrew Carnegie

My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.

- Seth Godin

The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished.

- Elon Musk

Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.

- Seth Godin

I loved doing ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Because you have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.

- Steve Martin

I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.

- Steve Wozniak

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