Notable Quotables

If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that’s a good discussion. Maybe that’s the way to help close the deficit.

- Bill Gates

In the next decade, I see Spanx going worldwide. Everywhere. No butt left behind. It’s going to be all over the world and it’s going to be an aspirational brand that transcends categories. There’s so many things we can improve upon and make better.

- Sara Blakely

When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.

- Larry Ellison

When marketing put yourself in the shoes of the customer.

- David Novak

Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.

- Seth Godin

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

- Winston Churchill

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

- Jeff Bezos

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.

- Thomas Edison

When I was 12 years old, I got interested in learning English.

- Jack Ma

I think the acquisition of consumers might be on the verge of being mapped. The battlefield is going to be retention and lifetime value.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Today, we’ve begun to make the extraordinary historic films of the National Archives available to the world for the first time online. Students and researchers whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon.

- Sergey Brin

Present my story and the difficulties that I have faced. As an entrepreneur, a CEO.

- Ben Horowitz

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

- Henry Ford

I think there’s a lot of merit in an international economy and global markets, but they’re not sufficient because markets don’t look after social needs.

- George Soros

There’s a belief that you’re supposed to be poor, and suffering, and show your humility. I just don’t see the Bible that way. I see that God came and Jesus died so that we might live an abundant life and be a blessing to others.

- Joel Olsteen

My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

- Elon Musk

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). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.

- Peter Thiel

We do benefit from the fact that once we say we’re going to do it, people believe we can do it, because we have the resources. Google helps in that way: There aren’t many funding mechanisms like that.

- Larry Page

Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

- Ben Horowitz

Learn to say No to the good so that you can say Yes to your best.

- John Maxwell

I got a call from the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah had chosen Spanx as one of her favorite products in 2000. I had boxes of product in my apartment and I had two weeks notice that she was going to say she loved it on TV and I had no shipping department.

- Sara Blakely

I am wired like a CEO and care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers even more than that. That’s always been my competitive advantage.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment…..the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy. A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.

- Peter Drucker

Market the change; be bold. Remember don’t be a bad ad, be a good one.

- David Novak

Whether you’re talking about the core consumer or the person on the street, the principle is the same: you have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.

- Phil Knight

To succeed in business, you must build a brand and never destroy it.

- Aliko Dangote

I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.

- Ben Horowitz

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful – it depends on how they’re managed.

- Ray Dalio

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner’s job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one’s own property.

- Peter Drucker

When men are fighting for their lives they are not often disposed to be complimentary to those who are trying to kill them.

- Winston Churchill

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

- Jack London

It’s no use saying, “We are doing our best.” You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

- Winston Churchill

The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is ‘Don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.’

- Ben Horowitz

I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

- Elon Musk

The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

- Ben Horowitz

First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

- Peter Thiel

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

- Bill Gates

I don’t spend any time thinking about my place in history, ever. If people say I changed things, it’s nice, and I take it – but if I could give it to a charity it would be useful. I really believe now that my only job in life is to achieve a state of comfort and happiness.

- Russell Simmons

When people get at each other’s throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.

- Ray Dalio

Christopher Colombus’ big mistake was that he was looking for a trade route to China, and accidentally bumped into America, the richest, most powerful country in the world.

- Robert Kiyosaki

The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

- Peter Drucker

The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.

- Michael Gerber

You can’t move people to action unless you first move them with emotion. The heart comes before the head…to lead yourself use your head, to lead others use your heart.

- John Maxwell

Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.

- Sergey Brin

Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.

- Peter Drucker

Some conflicts are simply territorial. For instance, I’ve rarely met a marketing person who wanted to raise prices and I’ve rarely met a finance person who wanted to lower prices.

- David Novak

Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] … by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks … to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly.

- Winston Churchill

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

- Bill Gates

Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.

- Peter Thiel

The bigger your list, the greater your options. That doesn’t mean you contact everyone on your list each time you send out a press release. You pick and choose who gets what, and block out long-term strategy as you go.

- Michael Levine

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

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.

- Bill Gates

Young people, when they’re left alone, always want to have compassion, and they always want to give. They always want to help people who are less fortunate.

- Russell Simmons

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

- Henry Ford

If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it.

- Peter Thiel

You have no ability, if you’re a financial institution and you’re threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate.

- Warren Buffett

The Lack of Candor is the biggest and deepest darkest secrets of business…People might not have agree with me on every issue, and I may not have been right all the time, but they always knew they were getting it straight and honest.

- Jack Welch

If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.

- Seth Godin

Winning ‘Motor Trend’ Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.

- Elon Musk

When commercializing disruptive technologies, they found or developed new markets that valued the attributes of the disruptive products, rather than search for a technological breakthrough so that the disruptive product could compete as a sustaining technology in mainstream markets.

- Clayton M. Christensen

We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.

- Larry Page

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

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

- Winston Churchill

Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

- Bill Gates

The boy you trained, gone he is. Consumed by Darth Vader.

- Yoda

Google’s search algorithms, for example, return results better than anyone else’s. Proprietary technologies for extremely short page load times and highly accurate query autocompletion add to the core search product’s robustness and defensibility.

- Peter Thiel

This could easily end up one of the driest winters ever, unless things switch around.

- Ed Clark

It’s ironic that no matter where I go, I meet people from Brooklyn. I’m proud of that heritage. It’s where I’m from, who I am.

- Howard Schultz

What we maybe should’ve realized sooner was that we are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber. And this political race is happening in every major city in the world. And because this isn’t about a democracy, this is about a product, you can’t win 51 to 49. You have to win 98 to 2.

- Travis Kalanick

Saudi Arabia has stability. The social contract and the political contract between the king and the rulers and the royal family and the ruled people in Saudi Arabia is very strong and the bondage is so solid.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

I think when companies are struggling, they don’t want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren’t interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it’s like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That’s slanted the whole thing quite a bit.

- Ben Horowitz

Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

- Winston Churchill

For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary.

- Peter Thiel

Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Accordingly, a ‘genius’ is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.

- Thomas Edison

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

- Thomas Edison

You can make positive deposits in your own economy every day by reading and listening to powerful, positive, life-changing content and by associating with encouraging and hope-building people.

- Zig Ziglar

To Be Success In Life Forget The Problems That You Face…But Don’t Forget The Lessons That Those Problems Taught To..

- Harvey Mackay

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

- Andrew Carnegie

All of us, in a sense, struggle continuously all the time, because we never get what we want. The important thing which I’ve really learned is how do you not give up, because you never succeed in the first attempt.

- Mukesh Ambani

The Interros strategy toward various assets generally depends on the stage of their development and level of their maturity.

- Vladimir Potanin

The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.

- Vince Lombardi

I have asked thousands of business people to smile at someone every hour of the day for a week and then come to class and talk about the results.

- Dale Carnegie

The Chinese market is a very good expansion opportunity for us, and we will continue looking to buy stakes and make acquisitions.

- Dhanin Chearavanont

When I look at the 10% of Americans who control 90% of all the shares in America and 73% of the wealth, I understand exactly where their wealth was derived. Many acquired that wealth in much the same way as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison (who was worth far more than Bill Gates at his day and age). The list includes Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Warren Buffet, Rupert Murdock, Anita Roddick, Richard Branson, and others who all acquired their wealth the same way. They found their spirit and their mission; built a business; and allowed others to share in the dreams, the risks as well as the rewards. You can do the same thing if you want. Just follow the same diagram rich dad guided me with: the B-I Triangle.

- Robert Kiyosaki

An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions. People are quite flexible, in that they can be trained to succeed at quite different things. An employee of IBM, for example, can quite readily change the way he or she works, in order to work successfully in a small start-up company. But processes and values are not flexible. A process that is effective at managing the design of a minicomputer, for example, would be ineffective at managing the design of a desktop personal computer. Similarly, values that cause employees to prioritize projects to develop high-margin products, cannot simultaneously accord priority to low-margin products. The very processes and values that constitute an organization’s capabilities in one context, define its disabilities in another context.

- Clayton M. Christensen

Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.

- Timothy Ferriss

Are you committed to a life of continual counseling, growth, and education? Are you committed to a life of consistently receiving truth, of renewing your mind? From what sources do you receive your counseling? Are you reading books by authors who speak wisdom? Are you listening to music and watching movies that have redemptive and edifying themes? Are you involved in a small group or community of people that can offer you support, guidance, and encouragement, and in which you give back that which you have been given? Do you know of professional counselors you can see when needed? Are you asking God for wisdom about life on a regular basis? (He says if you will ask, He will provide [see James 1:5–8].)

- Zig Ziglar

You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.

- Elon Musk

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