Notable Quotables

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

- Jack Welch

Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.

- Sam Walton

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

- Bill Gates

e liked to call them idiots for making it too expensive. Well, one megabyte of RAM back then cost 10,000 of today’s dollars. He made a cheap one — but what he did was he made a really weak, lousy computer, to tell you truth, in the Macintosh, and still at a fairly high price. He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there. It was a lousy product. Every time we improved the Macintosh, year by year by year, it got closer to what the Lisa had been.

- Steve Wozniak

College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.

- Peter Thiel

I was fascinated with jeans, because you can impress your life upon the jeans you wear. The way you sit imprints on the jeans.

- Jack Dorsey

A leader once convinced a particular action is the right one, must have the determination to stick with it and be undaunted when the going gets rough.

- Ronald Reagan

In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.

- Mark Zuckerberg

For myself I am an optimist – it does not seem to be much use to be anything else.

- Winston Churchill

The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

- Bill Gates

No matter how dark and gloomy it looks in your life right now, if you’ll release the weight of those burdens, you will see the sun break forth.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Simon Sinek

When I was at Kingsoft, I was under pressure and worked hard, but the results were not satisfactory.

- Lei Jun

I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.

- George Soros

The funny thing is people won’t let me pay for things. I’ll be in a restaurant and the manager will say, ‘Oh nom it’s on the house.’

- Richard Branson

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

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

- Steve Jobs

The very important thing you should have is patience.

- Jack Ma

In the 1960s, if you were a blue collar worker or uneducated, and you had an injury on the job, the company basically dismissed you.

- Howard Schultz

Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win.

- Peter Thiel

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.

- Warren G. Tracy

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

the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19

- James C. Collins

If you want to spend time saying this is cool, you’re going to get your ass kicked.

- Phil Knight

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way.

- Timothy Ferriss

New research shows that you will be dead longer than you will be alive.

- Zig Ziglar

It turned out there was alot to learn about running a store. And, of course, what really drove Sam was that competition across the street – John Dunham over at the Sterling Store. Sam was always over there checking on John. Always. Looking at his prices, looking at his displays, looking at what was going on. He was always looking for a way to do a better job. I don’t remember the details, but I remember some kind of panty-price-war they got into. Later on, long after we left Newport, and John had retired, we would seem him and he would laugh about Sam always being in his store. But I’m sure it aggravate him quite a bit early on. John had never had good competition before Sam. Helen Walton (Sam’s Wife): That Newport store was really the beginning of where Walmart is today. We did everything. We would wash windows, sweep floors, trim windows. We did all the stockroom work checked the freight in. Everything it took to run a store. We had to keep expenses to a minimum. That is where it started, year ago. Our money was made by controlling expenses. That, and Sam always being ingeniious. He never stopped trying to do something different. One thing, though I never forgave him for making me clean out that damned ice cream machine…

- Bud Walton

Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.

- George Soros

Your job should make you want to get out of bed

- Tony Hsieh

If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return – if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.

- Dale Carnegie

The more you are grateful for what you have the more you will have to be grateful for.

- Zig Ziglar

Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

- Peter Thiel

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

- Walt Disney

I try to keep in touch with the details… I also look at the product daily. That doesn’t mean you interfere, but it’s important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what’s happening.

- Rupert Murdoch

Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.

- Dale Carnegie

But it’s possible the orbits of the asteroids today show some memory of having had a planet in the asteroid belt.

- John Chambers

Today, getting people to hear your story on social media, and then act on it, requires using a platform’s native language, paying attention to context, understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each platform unique, and adapting your content to match.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate

- Seth Godin

Sometimes God will deliver you from the fire, and other times God will make you fireproof.

- Joel Olsteen

A lovely nook of forest scenery, or a grand rock, like a beautiful woman, depends for much of its attractiveness upon the attendance sense of freedom from whatever is low; upon a sense of purity and of romance.

- P.T. Barnum

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I am an expert in Higher Level Math. You + God= Enough

- Zig Ziglar

I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.

- Yoda

To Admiral Cunningham it was against all tradition to abandon the Army in such a crisis. He declared, “It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.

- Winston Churchill

Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.

- Peter Thiel

In philosophy, politics, and business, too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.

- Peter Thiel

This can only be accomplished by people who live, breathe, eat and sleep what they are doing…. [I am] associated with a large group of knowledgeable, dedicated [people] who eat, breathe, and sleep the world of aeronautics…. Man’s objective should be opportunity for greater accomplishment and greater service. The greatest pleasure life has to offer is the satisfaction that flows from… participating in a difficult and constructive undertaking.

- James C. Collins

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.

- Peter Thiel

My mother taught me something at a young age – she said ‘you are the company you keep’. To define yourself by some label or some level of resources – that’s pretty shallow.

- Howard Schultz

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

- Bill Gates

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

- Henry Ford

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren’t thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about – they weren’t putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

- Jeff Bezos

Cultural industries will be the next engine for growth after real estate, and Wanda will make cultural industries our long-term focus.

- Wang Jianlin

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

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

- George Soros

No business can stay in business without customers. How you treat – or mistreat – them determines how long your doors stay open.

- Harvey Mackay

It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.

- Phil Knight

I would argue heavily that the time that has been allocated to social used to come from television, and people are benefitting from it. People who are saying, ‘Aw, you’re spending all your time on Facebook, or all your time on Twitter,’ I’d like to understand what the person used to do with that time.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The saving of money is solely a matter of habit. It is literally true that man, through the Law of Habit, shapes his own personality. Through repetition, any act indulged in a few times becomes a habit, and the mind appears to be nothing more than a mass of motivating forces growing out of our daily habits. When once fixed in the mind a habit voluntarily impels one to action.

- Napoleon Hill

Let me remind everyone in this room that we are not changing guidance.

- John Chambers

It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.

- Timothy Ferriss

We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.

- Phil Knight

At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun ‘at work’ and getting paid for it!

- Zig Ziglar

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

- Winston Churchill

The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.

- Peter Thiel

By providing the systems that make the Internet work, Cisco is playing a major role in helping customers thrive in the explosive Internet economy. As a result, we are growing faster than all of our key competitors and have been the fastest growing and most profitable company in the history of the computer industry.

- John Chambers

It’s true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.

- Peter Thiel

If you want to build a dynasty, you need to always be focused on getting better and beating last year’s performance in everything you do. You want to eliminate peaks and valleys, what we call boom, splat, and go for a good steady incline.

- David Novak

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

- Bill Gates

I think Twitter is the future of communications and Square will be the payment network.

- Jack Dorsey

the expression one wears on one’s face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one’s back

- Dale Carnegie

Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.

- Zig Ziglar

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

No individual may have great power without availing himself of the Master Mind.

- Napoleon Hill

People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete – the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.

- Peter Drucker

I still get up fairly early around six, but I work out for an hour every morning, I read often while excercising and give myself some private team. I’ll speak with administrative my administrative assistant, Donna Hughes, who is an organizational genus on the way into the office and go through the day, so by the time I get to the office around 8:30 or 9:00 I can hit the ground running…In both my workday and my life, what I try to achieve is balance.

- David Novak

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

- Bill Gates

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

- Maya Angelou

To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone

- Sergey Brin

Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation…. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!

- Thomas Edison

The customer reaction to Dell going private has been a lot more positive than I would have ever imagined. Customers see it as – ‘You don’t have to be distracted. Now you can totally focus on your business.’ So they see it as a positive.

- Michael Dell

I don’t believe that government is good at picking technology, particularly technology that is changing. By the time you get it done and go through democracy, it’s so outdated.

- Michael Bloomberg

It’s easy to dream about it … Much harder to execute it ….Work!

- Gary Vaynerchuk

We will invest 1.1 billion dollars in India, of which 150 million dollars would be for providing leasing and financial solutions to the company’s customers and partners.

- John Chambers

Relationships are leverage. If you give value to someone else first, you have leverage.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

- Stephen R. Covey

The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

- Bill Gates

The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.

- Ma Huateng

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