Notable Quotables

Twitter in 2000 was something that was fun to play with but something I put on the shelf to play with for another day. And that day was 2006.

- Jack Dorsey

There should be order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.

- Ma Huateng

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

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.

- Oscar Wilde

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.

- Winston Churchill

To all of us comes that moment in life when we are literally tapped on the shoulder to do a very special thing unique to ourselves and our talents. What a pity if that moment finds us unprepared.

- Winston Churchill

If I hadn’t given my money away, I’d have had more than anyone else on the planet.

- Bill Gates

No matter how many times you get knocked down, keep getting back up. God sees your resolve. He sees your determination. And when you do everything you can do, that’s when God will step in and do what you can’t do.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

- Bill Gates

The first four months of 2001 were extremely challenging, … This may be the fastest deceleration any company of our size has ever experienced.

- John Chambers

I’m trying to change the culture in New York City, that’s hard enough!

- Michael Bloomberg

Our business is diversified across many sectors, be it supermarkets or finance. We can invest in many areas.

- Dhanin Chearavanont

Steve really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn’t there. He took over the project, and it was really my own opinion — only my opinion — that he wanted to compete with the Lisa group that had kicked him out.

- Steve Wozniak

Life is actually far better than it is in the movies. And it takes longer.

- Seth Godin

People always underestimate Africa. If you want to follow what’s on ground, you would not want to invest in Nigeria; when you look at it from the patriotism point of view, you will ask yourself: how did those great countries become great?

- Aliko Dangote

Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.

- Larry Ellison

There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise. My dad taught me that when you borrow money it’s the worst day of your life.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do, because we started out underfinanced and undercapitalized in these remote small communities, contributed mightily to the way we’ve grown as a company. Had we been capitalized, or had we been the offshoot of a large corporation the way I wanted to be, we might not ever have tried…

- Sam Walton

For many of us, the happiest future is one that’s precisely like the past, except a little better.

- Seth Godin

The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today.

- Peter Thiel

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end.

- Walt Disney

We’re working toward the ability for all Cisco devices to work together and communicate with each other to stop attacks. The idea is that one device can warn another device of a threat.

- John Chambers

THE HABIT OF DOING MORE THAN PAID FOR – One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness, upon the part of the leader, to do more than he requires of his followers.

- Napoleon Hill

I was the only westerner to succeed in a place that’s like a toilet, and you always come out of a toilet with a smell.

- David Reuben

It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.

- Dale Carnegie

Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.

- Peter Drucker

The idea of Twitter started with me working in dispatch since I was 15 years old, where taxi cabs or firetrucks would broadcast where they were and what they were doing.

- Jack Dorsey

If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook. And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone. If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault. That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. ‘I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.’ What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.

- Seth Godin

The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit… a reputation, character.

- John D. Rockefeller

In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

- Ben Horowitz

Maybe you’ve invested a lot of time, effort, money, emotion, and energy in a relationship; you did your best to make it work out. But for some reason, things got off course. And now you feel as though you have been robbed. When we focus on or disappointments, we stop God from ringing fresh new blessing into our lives.

- Joel Olsteen

Don’t waste your energy trying to convince people to understand you. Your time is too valuable to try to prove yourself to people.

- Joel Olsteen

The Hindus are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

- Joel Olsteen

Success is the maximum utilization of the ability you have.

- Zig Ziglar

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

- Winston Churchill

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s not about how to get started, it’s about how to get noticed.

- Steve Case

Unemployment in America today is too high. And part of the reason, unfortunately, is that many companies cannot fill the high-skilled jobs increasingly at risk of going overseas.

- Michael Bloomberg

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

- Sam Walton

A company needs lots of smart, super-engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them.

- Ben Horowitz

Let’s test the Shakespearean model in the real world. Imagine a production called Gates and Schmidt, based on Romeo and Juliet. Montague is Microsoft. Capulet is Google. Two great families, run by alpha nerds, sure to clash on account of their sameness.

- Peter Thiel

What I know is that if you do work that you love, and the work fulfills you, the rest will come.

- Oprah Winfrey

I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

- Thomas Edison

When a man has accumulated a sum of money, accumulated it within the law, the Government has no right to share in its earnings.

- John D. Rockefeller

It’s not always easy to get over some of those bumps in the road, those disillusionments and disappointments. It’s going to take a strong will. Sometimes, it may take courage. Sometimes nothing but faith in God and say, I refuse to be trapped in the past. I’m not going to let the past destroy my future. I’m pressing on. I’m straining forward, knowing that God has great things in store for me.

- Joel Olsteen

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I think people instinctively know that their job is to give service and that they are part of a community. It had a great impact on me when my father walked the picket lines and I walked with him during the civil rights movement.

- Russell Simmons

On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We’ve got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers – and there could be a lot of them – will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.

- Howard Schultz

The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.

- Thomas Edison

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

With the inherent value in Cabot’s capital program, we recommenced buying shares in late November and early December with the market pull back. We still see a lot of merit and long-term value for the shareholders in looking at COG stock as an investment alternative.

- Dan Dinges

A full and fair discussion is essential to democracy.

- George Soros

Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

- Warren Buffett

Call it the emergence of a “world’s bank” – a system built by and for the people, delivering credit in America and across the globe in a radically decentralized, highly scalable, and crucially equitable way. The World Bank funds institutions.The world’s bank funds people.

- Reid Hoffman

Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose…

- Thomas Edison

I’m not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.

- Rupert Murdoch

Use technology to remind people that we are really human and civilization is meant to connect together. Civilization is meant to be easy, and the technology to completely disappear. And should be easy to pick up.

- Jack Dorsey

To me, job titles don’t matter. Everyone is in sales. It’s the only way we stay in business.

- Harvey Mackay

You cannot underestimate people’s ability to spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away. It’s a big reason why so many companies that have dipped a toe in social media waters have failed miserably.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Even if you are predisposed to being overweight, you’re not predestined to be fat.

- Timothy Ferriss

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

- Henry Ford

We’re responsible for the creation of the PC industry. The whole idea of compatible machines and lots of software.. that’s something we brought to computing. And so it’s a responsibility for us to make sure that things like security don’t get in the way of that dream.

- Bill Gates

Help young people. Help small guys. Because small guys will be big. Young people will have the seeds you bury in their minds, and when they grow up, they will change the world.

- Jack Ma

No company has a culture, every company is a culture.

- Peter Thiel

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

Remain close to government and away from politics. It means deal more with the authorities. And less with individuals.

- Wang Jianlin

I feel good about being able to take bluegrass on to television like ‘Letterman’ and ‘The View,’ and I’ve heard nice things about being able to do that. I really haven’t felt any negativity toward me or my music.

- Steve Martin

Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they’ve succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.

- Ben Horowitz

El séptimo imperativo • El primer imperativo es estar al tanto; al tanto del mercado, de las oportunidades y de quién eres. • El segundo imperativo es estar preparados, para entender lo que sucede a tu alrededor. • El tercer imperativo es estar conectado, para que confíen en ti. • El cuarto imperativo es ser coherente, para que el sistema sepa qué esperar de ti. • El quinto imperativo es crear un valor, para tener algo que vender. • El sexto imperativo es ser productivo, para ofrecer un buen precio. No obstante, es posible que hagas todas estas cosas y aun así fracases. Un empleo no es suficiente, ni una fábrica, ni una industria. Solían serlo, pero ya no lo son. El mundo está cambiando muy rápido, y sin la chispa de la iniciativa te limitas a reaccionar ante lo que te rodea. Asimismo, sin la capacidad de incitar y experimentar estás estancado, a la deriva, esperando el empujón…

- Seth Godin

The most practical, beautiful, workable philosophy in the world won’t work if you won’t.

- Zig Ziglar

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.

- Seth Godin

There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice

- Simon Sinek

If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

- Peter Thiel

I wanted to be a sailor, I wanted to sail the world, to navigate it.

- Jack Dorsey

The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there.

- Jack Welch

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

- Bill Gates

For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.

- Joel Olsteen

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