If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
It takes the same effort to think small than to think big. But to think big frees you from the insignificant details.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.
- Thomas J Watson
Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
- Steve Jobs
Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
- Winston Churchill
It is a very big exaggeration to say I am a friend of Mr. Putin.
- Alexei Mordashov
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
- Jeff Bezos
The Real ReasonNew College Grads Can’t Get Hired shocked many when it reported, The Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College finds that more than 60% of employers say applicants lack communication and interpersonal skills
- Martha C. White
Ethical decisions ensure that everyone’s best interests are protected. When in doubt, don’t.
- Harvey Mackay
A false transaction using my own people to buy the flat? I’ll make a bet with you. For every $10,000 you put down, I’ll wager $1 million.
- Lee Shau Kee
Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.
- Andrew Carnegie
The road to comfort is crowded and it rarely gets you there. Ironically, it’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.
- Seth Godin
You hit what you aim at, and if you aim at nothing you will hit it every time.
- Zig Ziglar
If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.
- Mark Zuckerberg
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 challenge with being an initiator of projects is that you are never, ever done.
- Seth Godin
Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do. It’s why Nike is Nike, it’s why Apple is Apple, it’s why Walt Disney built Disney World and it’s why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Real change rarely comes from the front of the line. It happens from the middle or even the back. Real change happens when someone who cares steps up and takes what feels like a risk. People follow because they want to, not because you can order them to.
- Seth Godin
Doing a mall is not only construction of the physical place, what’s important is the merchandising mix.
- Henry Sy
If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.
- Zig Ziglar
Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can’t see it.
- Seth Godin
Most of us have never felt at a disadvantage because we did not receive any inheritance. About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent.
- Thomas J Stanley
We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we’re in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There’s no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.
- Steve Ballmer
Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it’s cute but boring and expensive.
- P.J. O'Rourke
Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.
- Elon Musk
If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it’s simply a poor use of resources.
- Timothy Ferriss
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
- Warren Buffett
Only God can look at somebody’s heart.
- Joel Olsteen
The Group will continue to press ahead steadily with an open mindset, a practical attitude, a broad vision and a unique insight, adhering to its ultimate objective of serving the nation and the wider community in the changing landscape.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know ‘No, he couldn’t have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.’
- Steve Wozniak
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
- Bill Gates
There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
- Peter Drucker
In the Networked Age, we’re all like the little kid from The Sixth Sense. If you’re not seeing networks when you enter a room, you might want to check your pulse.
- Reid Hoffman
The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.
- Thomas Edison
The future may be made up of many factors but where it truly lies is in the hearts and minds of men. Your dedication should not be confined for your own gain, but unleashes your passion for our beloved country as well as for the integrity and humanity of mankind.
- Li Ka-shing
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I prefer the old theaters because the audience is… trapped.
- Jerry Seinfeld
If it’s set up in such a way that it breaks the conditionality required by the (International Monetary Fund), I think that would be a step backward.
- John Chambers
There are a thousand excuses for failure, but never a good reason.
- Mark Twain
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
- Peter Thiel
My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.
- Jerry Seinfeld
What’s also missing is a sense of relationship. People suffer in isolation from one another. In a world without purpose, without meaningful values, what have we to share but our emptiness, the needy fragments of our superficial selves? As a result, most of us scramble about hungrily seeking distraction, in music, in television, in people, in drugs. And most of all we seek things. Things to wear and things to do. Things to fill the emptiness. Things to shore up our eroding sense of self. Things to which we can attach meaning, significance, life. We’ve fast become a world of things. And most people are being buried in the profusion. What most people need, then, is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning. A place in which being human is a prerequisite, but acting human is essential. A place where the generally disorganized thinking that pervades our culture becomes organized and clearly focused on a specific worthwhile result. A place where discipline and will become prized for what they are: the backbone of enterprise and action, of being what you are intentionally instead of accidentally. A place that replaces the home most of us have lost. That’s what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing.
- Michael Gerber
Computing shows up in many different ways. You have computing that you wear, computing that you carry. What you think of as the traditional PC market has a long tail of usage, particularly in the commercial world, but also in consumer.
- Michael Dell
Don’t be cocky. Don’t be flashy. There’s always someone better than you.
- Tony Hsieh
At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn’t even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm.
- Ma Huateng
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.
- John C. Maxwell
The London property market has excellent investment opportunities.
- Wang Jianlin
If a man’s heart is rankling with discord and ill feeling toward you, you can’t win him to your way of thinking with all the logic in Christendom. Scolding parents and domineering bosses and husbands and nagging wives ought to realize that people don’t want to change their minds. They can’t be forced or driven to agree with you or me. But they may possibly be led to, if we are gentle and friendly, ever so gentle and ever so friendly.
- Dale Carnegie
I first thought maybe I’d do a banjo presentation record, where I’d play a couple of songs and get a bunch of other players to do the rest. Then I realized I had enough of my own songs to do an album of them.
- Steve Martin
We must hang together or we will hang together.
- Benjamin Franklin
the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability,” said John D., than for any other under the sun.
- Dale Carnegie
There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?
- Warren Buffett
Success is not what you have, but who you are.
- Bo Bennett
I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
- Winston Churchill
When the economy does pick up, … so will … spending.
- John Chambers
The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.
- Peter Thiel
A third of the people who rush to psychiatrists for help could probably cure themselves if they could only do as Margaret Yates did: get interested in helping others. My idea? No, that is approximately what Carl Jung said. And he ought to know—if anybody does. He said: About one third of my patients are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.” To put it another way, they are trying to thumb a ride through life—and the parade passes them by. So they rush to a psychiatrist with their petty, senseless, useless lives. Having missed the boat, they stand on the wharf, blaming everyone except themselves and demanding that the world cater to their self-centered desires.
- Dale Carnegie
The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
- Peter Drucker
No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.
- Bill Gates
People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.
- Dale Carnegie
Not every Apple product makes a big enough difference to me to get instantly, although many do.
- Steve Wozniak
Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
- Ben Horowitz
Well, we have to provide the world’s best schools. We certainly don’t have them, but that’s our objective.
- Michael Bloomberg
Every job you take is a gamble that could increase your options or shut them down.
- Jack Welch
An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.
- Elon Musk
Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money; it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows? Maybe just like that little baby, putting your arm around somebody and letting him or her know that you care can help begin to heal that person’s heart. Maybe you can give a rescuing hug.
- Joel Olsteen
Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world. We can store an incredible amount of data very cheaply
- Sergey Brin
The more people I serve, the richer I become.
- Robert Kiyosaki
You won’t get anything unless you have the vision to imagine it.
- John Lennon
You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.
- Zig Ziglar
I don’t like to look back, and I’m always worried about the next thing rather than resting on the laurels or the degradations of the last thing.
- Steve Martin
By the end of the war (the civil war) John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags, or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.
- Ron Chernow
It is very helpful to me, in my job, for people to know me better. A lot of that is, it’s a communication job.
- Ben Horowitz
We don’t mature momentarily, but over the long-term.
- John C. Maxwell
The biggest part of my job now is to quickly develop successors, and around the world I am working to develop new business leaders in the company.
- Tadashi Yanai
It will be disastrous when a leader or manager shows up with one attitude one day and treats people with a different attitude the next day.
- Zig Ziglar
If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.
- Elon Musk
I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man…Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters – seldom in any school of writing.Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object….we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration:’The world is my country; to do good my religion.’Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in ‘The Rights of Man’, and that genius busy at his favorite task – liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, ‘The Rights of Man’ yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke’s effort in his ‘Reflections’.Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him.’Tom Paine is quite right,’ said Pitt, the Prime Minister, ‘but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.’Here we see the progressive quality of Paine’s genius at its best. ‘The Rights of Man’ amplified and reasserted what already had been said in ‘Common Sense’, with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France.So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre’s enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument.But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of ‘The Age of Reason’ and now turned his time to the latter part.Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events ‘The Age of Reason’ appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle – a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking.
- Thomas Edison
My personal opinion is that I’m in the media too much. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.
- Viktor Vekselberg
I cut the feet out of my control top pantyhose to wear under these white pants and that was the ah-ha moment that started Spanx. My own butt was my own inspiration!
- Sara Blakely
I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage — leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
- Warren Buffett
While technology is still important, the consumer has to lead innovation.
- Phil Knight
An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
- Elon Musk
I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.
- Steve Martin
When you start a company, you’re basically jumping off a cliff. You don’t have any sense of where you’re going to land, what to do when you land, or what you should be doing inmidair. It’s very very scary. But it’s much easier when you have somebody to commiserate with you who knows what you’re going through, and who you know will always be on your side.
- Seth Goldman
The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.
- James C. Collins
your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.
- Dale Carnegie
These two chefs will play an important role in managing the company’s growing appetites.
- Sergey Brin
It’s not about how to get started, it’s about how to get noticed.
- Steve Case
God is faithful to His word. All of His promises are Yes” and Amen.” That means if you will do your part and believe even though it looks impossible, and not let your mind, your emotions, or other people talk you out of it, then God promises in due season and at the right time He will bring it to pass. It may not happen the way you expect it or on your timetable, but God is a faithful God. It will happen.
- Joel Olsteen
But at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. 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
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.
- Donald Trump
Jesus was saying that you can’t have a larger life with restricted attitudes.
- Joel Olsteen
When you’ve got a strong enough why, you can always find the how.
- Zig Ziglar
The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going.
- Napoleon Hill
The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.
- Elon Musk
I am easily satisfied with the very best.
- Winston Churchill
