Notable Quotables

I think like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Failure is a great teacher. At the same time, you must remember, success will never last… Whether it’s tech or fashion, it must be for the customer.

- Tadashi Yanai

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

- Bill Gates

I will not allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure.

- Og Mandino

We hate bureaucracy and all the nonsense that comes with it.

- Jack Welch

Not only was the casual shoe effort a failure, but it was diluting our trademark and hurting us in running.

- Phil Knight

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

- John D. Rockefeller

You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth.

- Winston Churchill

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

Politics are close to me, but there are different ways of participating in politics.

- Vagit Alekperov

When you network, your aim is to meet people who are going places in their lives. You want to meet people who are ahead of you in their careers and in their organizations. You want to meet people you can look up to with pride. You want to meet people who can be friends, guides and mentors.

- Brian Tracy

People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast.

- Peter Thiel

by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined.

- James C. Collins

Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It’s really a great invention and I wouldn’t under-estimate the value of that, but they’re not designed to take care of social needs.

- George Soros

I believe the scripture says that being gay is a sin.

- Joel Olsteen

Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind.

- Winston Churchill

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

Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.

- Jack Welch

As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.

- Peter Thiel

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

- Elon Musk

Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverise, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now—for one occasion only—his Master.

- Winston Churchill

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.

- Peter Thiel

Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

- Jerry Seinfeld

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

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

- Bill Gates

I am excited for the opportunity to pursue new interests, including my work with a few public company boards, several universities in the U.S. and the UK and ophthalmic charities whose goals are to improve eye health in emerging markets.

- David Pyott

Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders.

- Seth Godin

If something is worth doing, it is worth doing right. I take that one step further. You shouldn’t do anything unless you do it right.

- George Foreman

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Listening is just as important in one’s home life as in the world of business.

- Dale Carnegie

Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.

- Donald Trump

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

- Winston Churchill

Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles.

- Peter Thiel

The idea is to have relationships where you make money and the other guy makes money, too. That’s how a business keeps its team together.

- Russell Simmons

When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.

- Larry Ellison

Darwin Smith stands as a classic example of what we came to call a Level 5 leader—an individual who blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will.

- James C. Collins

Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.

- Peter Thiel

You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

- Jeff Bezos

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

- Richard P. Feynman

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.

- Bill Gates

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

- Andrew Carnegie

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the 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. Let them 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

I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.

- Warren Buffett

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‘Automobile Magazine.’ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I believe Success is achieved by ordinary people with Extraordinary Determination.

- Zig Ziglar

Other people’s successes are good news – for them and for you. Good for you because they show you a way to go.

- Stephen Wynn

The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.

- Yoda

With residential property prices having dropped by around two-thirds from their peak in 1997 and local interest rates dropping to their historic lows, mortgage payments currently falls below rental payment. This positive carry has led to property purchases by both home purchasers as well as investors. Further, with the local stock market becoming active again and reaching its highest level in the past 17 months, this has resulted in an increase in the number of transactions and a price for the luxury properties.

- Lee Shau Kee

The challenge with being an initiator of projects is that you are never, ever done.

- Seth Godin

Don’t go into the new year holding a grudge from last year. Leave the hurts and disappointments behind.

- Joel Olsteen

What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

- Winston Churchill

Many people fail to make a favourable impression because they don’t listen attentively.

- Isaac F. Marcosson

Every day is a gift from God. There’s no guarantee of tomorrow, so that tells me to see the good in this day to make the most of it.

- Joel Olsteen

The bottom line is that you need to do follow-up or you will be mediocre.

- Chet Holmes

Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.

- John C. Maxwell

There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

- Bill Gates

My ultimate dream is for the Irvine Ranch to be known and celebrated as much for the outstanding communities we’ve planned and built as it is for what is not developed. The beneficiary being the 50,000 acres of undeveloped land that is now permanently preserved and conserved as Open Space and parklands.

- Donald Bren

As much as I love crisp, clean whites, there’s always a time for rich but balanced Chardonnays with oak, especially at Thanksgiving.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Flavor is, counterintuitively, less than 10% taste and more than 90% smell.

- Timothy Ferriss

In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.

- Wang Jianlin

Education comes from within, you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

- Napoleon Hill

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.

- Seth Godin

The expensive act of planning on late When you’re late, there’s not a lot of room for choice or decision or initiative. When you’re late, the path is well lit, and the choices are clear. Run! Run down the path you’ve run down before. Late is a tool for people unable to find the guts to stand for their acts. Late gives us cover; it permits us to trample forward, without creativity or panache. “Can’t you see I’m late!” we shout, as we do what we have to do, without even pausing to think about what we could do instead. Late might be useful, except that late is incredibly expensive. This strategy, the one we choose so we can avoid the fear of choice, costs us in so many ways. It degrades quality, misses airplanes, charges overtime, and shuts down those around us. It’s also exhausting. The alternative to planning on late is to initiate before it’s required, to ship before deadline, to put the idea out there before the crisis hits. This act of bravery actually gives you influence, leverage, and control in a way that planning on late never can.

- Seth Godin

We are pleased to report the 33rd consecutive quarter of revenue and earnings growth. We are especially pleased with the balanced growth rate across almost all countries in both Europe and the Americas.

- John Chambers

We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend.

- Peter Thiel

I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.

- Reid Hoffman

A decade and a half ago an ‘Esquire’ magazine reporter, noting our advertising played up the heros as aspects of great atheletes asked the question, who is your hero? My answer was simple. My college track coach and partner, Bill Bowerman. He had won four national championships, coached more sub four minute milers than anyone when he retired. He was the 1972 Olympic coach yet he insisted he was not a track coach. He was a professor of competitive response.

- Phil Knight

It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because all that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.

- Mark Cuban

What you get by reaching your destination is not nearly as important as what you will become by reaching your destination.

- Zig Ziglar

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

- Elon Musk

A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.

- Steve Wozniak

I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.

- Jeff Bezos

Proclaim this among the nations: Prepare war. Stir up the mighty men. Let all the warriors draw near. Let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, And your pruning hooks into spears. Let the weak say, I am strong.

- Joel 3:9

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

We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.

- Elon Musk

Slow Dance: Have you ever watched kids, On a merry-go-round? Or listened to the rain, Slapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight? Or gazed at the sun into the fading night? You better slow down. Don’t dance too fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Do you run through each day, On the fly? When you ask: How are you? Do you hear the reply? When the day is done, do you lie in your bed, With the next hundred chores, Running through your head? You’d better slow down, Don’t dance too fast. Time is short, The music won’t last. Ever told your child we’ll do it tomorrow? And in your haste, Not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch, Let a good friendship die, Cause you never had time, To call and say Hi? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. When you run so fast to get somewhere, You miss half the fun of getting there. When you worry and hurry through your day, It is like an unopened gift thrown away. Life is not a race. Do take it slower. Hear the music, Before the song is over.

- Timothy Ferriss

Where you start is not as important as where you finish.

- Zig Ziglar

Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.

- Winston Churchill

I’m going to retain a lot of Microsoft’s stock.

- Bill Gates

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

- Dale Carnegie

As a company it is always better for us to work with more customers than fewer customers. The more people that we serve, the more money that we will make.

- Napoleon Hill

If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?

- Timothy Ferriss

It’s a matter of invitations versus context. Twitter is really good at providing context, like, I’m having coffee at Third Rail Coffee.’ Foursquare is about invitations to places. In this respect Foursquare has started to replace Yelp for me.

- Jack Dorsey

You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated.

- James C. Collins

If you say too much or mix in multiple pitches, you diffuse your goal. You must give the media a pitch they can hit.

- Michael Levine

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