I… had no need for cheering dreams,” he wrote. Facts are better than dreams.
- James C. Collins
Notable Quotables
I’ve always believed that there are funny people everywhere, but they’re just not comedians. In fact, some of my best comedic inspirations were not professional entertainers.
- Steve Martin
PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.
- Ben Horowitz
Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.
- Zig Ziglar
There is only one excuse for a speaker’s asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.
- Dale Carnegie
Do you ever worry’ asked Dale Carnegie, I replied: ‘No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?’
- Henry Ford
You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.
- John C. Maxwell
We are beginning to see the benefits of global consolidation.
- Lakshmi Mittal
If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.
- Ray Kroc
Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It’s something you have to learn. It’s a very lonely job.
- Ben Horowitz
It’s about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it’s Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it’s going to be, ‘Storyteller.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.
- Bill Gates
Great and good are seldom the same man.
- Winston Churchill
Don’t think small when you pray. God has a way to bring your dreams to pass if you’ll dare to be bold enough to ask.
- Joel Olsteen
Direct your energy toward achieving a goal, and tackle the problems with an emphasis on edging closer to a successful result.
- Harvey Mackay
I’m getting better. I’m improving. My health is coming back,” those words began to create a new image on the inside. Before long, they started seeing themselves strong, healthy, and whole.
- Joel Olsteen
The Loire Valley is grossly underestimated. The prices are fair, and the wines are real.
- 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
There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.
- Peter Drucker
We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If it’s not meeting a need, turn it into a seed. Remember, we will reap what we sow. When you do good for other people, that’s when God is going to make sure that His abundant blessings overtake you.
- Joel Olsteen
When Sam feels a certain way, he is relentless. He will just wear you out. He will bring up an idea, and we’ll discuss it and then decide maybe that it’s not something we should be doing right now or ever. Fine. Case closed. But as long as he is convinced that it is the right thing, it just keep coming up week after week – until finally everybody capitulates and says, well it’s easier to do it than to keep fighting this fight. I guess it could be called management by wearing you down.
- David Glass
Victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.
- Og Mandino
The only time I really become discouraged is when I think of all the things I would like to do and the little time I have in which to do them.
- Thomas Edison
GE’s businesses turned in a terrific first quarter. Our products and services are being well received in unusually robust global markets.
- Jack Welch
The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.
- Joel Olsteen
Never, give in! Never give in! Never, never, never… In nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions or honor and good sense!
- Winston Churchill
There are two paths people can take. They can either play now and pay later, or pay now and play later. Regardless of the choice, one thing is certain. Life will demand a payment.
- John C. Maxwell
So here we are.
- Seth Godin
I built a conglomerate and emerged the richest black man in the world in 2008 but it didn’t happen overnight, it took me 30 years.
- Aliko Dangote
On engagement, we’re already seeing that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users than desktop users. They’re more likely to use Facebook six or seven days of the week.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
- Alexander Graham Bell
Assume employees are going across a lot of networks. So you have to build in security from the home to any number of networks.
- John Chambers
Fear is one of the worst things in business.
- Jack Nadel
I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.
- Rupert Murdoch
I think that God gives you your own will and choices. I don’t believe that we’re supposed to drag ourselves through life defeated and not see God’s blessings. But you have to make the right choices and follow that still, small voice within you. Because I think that’s how God leads us.
- Joel Olsteen
Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine, so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form.
- Bill Gates
Do you know how many companies have wanted me to do an energy drink for them because I named my book ‘Crush It!’? It might be fun one day, but right now I think it would undermine the personal brand I’ve built.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
People who are able to lift up others and boost the morale in organization are invaluable, and they are always a tremendous asset to a leader’s inner circle.
- Napoleon Hill
Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.
- Bill Gates
Speed is of the essence in responding to a crisis situation, and our focus is squarely on mobilizing resources to help in the relief and rebuilding efforts, while also helping customers and employees recover.
- John Chambers
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.
- Steve Jobs
It was a big momentum deal, so when the bottom comes out from under it, you have to go back to the well and start the whole thing.
- Travis Kalanick
es it’s thinner, but I wanted storage. I don’t have broadband at home, and you can’t get great broadband connection in hotels, so I carry all my personal media in the iPad. So I was hoping Apple has a 256GB iPad. I was hoping for more storage so I could put every episode of Big Bang Theory on my iPad. So I emailed my wife and said ‘nope, I don’t want one of those.
- Steve Wozniak
God made you a masterpiece – be blessed, secure, disciplined and equipped.
- Joel Olsteen
Anybody can wish for riches, and most people do, but only a few know that a definite plan plus a burning desire for wealth, are the only dependable means of accumulating wealth.
- Napoleon Hill
It is unhealthy to marinate in your own press clippings.
- Sam Walton
The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.
- Elon Musk
The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.
- Vince Lombardi
We want to do a lot of stuff, we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
Americans believe cotton is best, but we’ve invented new fabrics that will change your lifestyle.
- Tadashi Yanai
I don’t think it’s a big deal to show opera glasses to someone searching for binoculars that you somehow infer is a woman. But you don’t want to pop up ads for H.I.V. drugs on someone’s page, because you inferred they have H.I.V., when their boss is standing there looking at their computer
- Sergey Brin
Seeing his education soley in utilitarian terms, he studied hard, but showed no intellectual playfulness.
- Ron Chernow
It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.
- Peter Drucker
Riches does not mean money. You can never have enough money. By following the principles of God he will provide you with what you need materially and internal committment.
- Ben Meinhardt
Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.
- Bill Gates
Maybe I was accepted to Harvard only because of my tennis skills, since I definitively had no great academic achievements. I was 17 and only thought about surfing and playing tennis. I had almost never left Rio de Janeiro and had never been to the United States.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.
- Jerry Seinfeld
From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.
- Elon Musk
I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.
- Seth Godin
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
- Timothy Ferriss
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
My priorities are; Family, Church, Business.
- Terry Fischer
We are always listening to ideas presented by our customers and in an effort to keep up with their demands, we are adding those quality improvements to Atlanta Motor Speedway. The changes we have planned are a direct result of fan input and are aimed at giving our fans options they currently don’t have.
- Ed Clark
True joy comes when you inspire, encourage, and guide someone else on a path that benefits him or her.
- Zig Ziglar
You don’t have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world.
- Jack Dorsey
The noblest art is that of making others happy.
- P.T. Barnum
To my mind the old masters are not art, their value is in their scarcity.
- Thomas Edison
The best investments are on main street, not Wall Street.
- Robert P. Miles
If you want to understand what drives Cisco, look at our approach to customers. The manner in which we serve our customers defines our company values and demonstrates our priorities. Cisco is proud to be honored with this important certification that recognizes the foundation of our culture — the importance that we place on ensuring our customers are successful with Cisco technology.
- John Chambers
Leaders never outgrow the need to change.
- John C. Maxwell
Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return; or, like the gentle Taft, will say: I don’t see how I could have done any differently from what I have.
- Dale Carnegie
When we are harassed and reach the limit of our own strength, many of us then turn in desperation to God-There are no atheists in foxholes. But why wait till we are desperate? Why not renew our strength every day? Why wait even until Sunday? For years I have had the habit of dropping into empty churches on weekday afternoons. When I feel that I am too rushed and hurried to spare a few minutes to think about spiritual things, I say to myself: Wait a minute, Dale Carnegie, wait a minute. Why all the feverish hurry and rush, little man? You need to pause and acquire a little perspective. At such times, I frequently drop into the first church that I find open. Although I am a Protestant, I frequently, on weekday afternoons, drop into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and remind myself that I’ll be dead in another thirty years, but that the great spiritual truths that all churches teach are eternal. I close my eyes and pray. I find that doing this calms my nerves, rests my body, clarifies my perspective, and helps me revalue my values. May I recommend this practice to you?
- Dale Carnegie
There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.
- Warren Buffett
Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
- Ben Horowitz
Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I’d try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, ‘This is the end.’ I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.
- Rupert Murdoch
Today I will be a successful sales professional, and I will learn something today that will make me even more professional tomorrow.
- Zig Ziglar
There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.
- Jack Welch
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
- Dale Carnegie
Connectivity enables transparency for better government, education, and health.
- Bill Gates
People were expecting Rouge to go bankrupt, so there was a lot of anxiety. The corporate culture problem was even worse than in Russia. And at the same time, the work rules were more difficult.
- Alexei Mordashov
Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires.
- Seth Godin
If you do not see yourself as a winner, you cannot perform as a winner.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m a reverend and a pastor. A pastor of the church. I go by usually pastor
- Joel Olsteen
I’m not a public official. I’m a businessman, I’m a builder, I’m a planner.
- Donald Bren
You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.
- Dale Carnegie
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- John C. Maxwell
I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing.
- Seth Godin
Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make
- Donald Trump
The first key factor, I believe, is unity. If a family is not united, how then can we unite our colleagues? If we don’t love our brothers or our family, how then can we go ahead to love our colleagues. So our tradition really is about the human factor and talents, and we are dependent on the human factor. Therefore we have this corporate slogan – The markets of the world can belong to our corporation, and so can the world’s foremost human talents; The markets of the world belongs to us, and so are the world’s vast resources of raw materials. Similarly, if we can gain access to it, then the world’s financial funding belongs to us as well. Therefore, of foremost importance is access to human talents. Of course, a slogan is only something that we speak of. Of greater importance, is to truly have access to human talents. Towards that purpose, we must first be united and possess love. Our family is very united. And for the sake of the company, we innovated – we introduced western-style (corporate) culture into our company 30 years ago.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
Music plays a very important role in my life. I’m a frustrated musician. I play the drums.
- Ronald Perelman
The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simply. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out, the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish, the other selfish. One is universally admired, the other universally condemned.
- Dale Carnegie
Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
- Dale Carnegie
Don’t do the natural thing, the impulsive thing. That is usually wrong.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.
- Ben Horowitz
The best way to predict the Future is with a Great, Unique Abilities Team
- Terry Powell
Put everything you’ve got into what you’re doing. Be totally focused–nothing should be haphazard.
- Donald Trump
While there were a number of highlights, it was probably the U.S. that topped the highlight list with strong order growth of approximately 20 percent year over year. This is better order growth than we’ve experienced in the last six quarters in the U.S..
- John Chambers





