We gradually came to the realization that we were hurting not just ourselves but the Chinese people.
- Sergey Brin
Notable Quotables
Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.
- Confucius
There’s a way to do it better – find it.
- Thomas Edison
When overtaken with the temporay feelings of potential failure, burn all of your bridges of retreat, thus making retreat impossible.
- Napoleon Hill
When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.
- Peter Thiel
If you’re a surfer, you just want to surf. You don’t know if anyone’s going to see you, and you don’t really care if they see you. You just live for that feeling.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Certainly, none of us enjoy going through struggles, but you have to understand that your struggle may be an opportunity for advancement and promotion. The very thing you are fighting against so tenaciously may be the springboard that catapults you to a new level of excellence. Your challenges may become your greatest assets.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business, I have always been pretty driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where we’ve been. On the one hand, in the community, I really am an establishment kind of guy; on the other hand, in the marketplace, I have always been a maverick who enjoys shaking things up and creating a little anarchy. And sometimes the establishments made me mad…
- Sam Walton
As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise – security, quality and worms.
- Ben Horowitz
I watch mostly independent films.
- Reed Hastings
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
- Winston Churchill
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. To know all is to forgive all.
- Dale Carnegie
If you want to be inventive — you have to be willing to fail.
- Jeff Bezos
It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.
- Winston Churchill
And being as wicked as any man who ever lived, he exploited his advantage to the full.
- Winston Churchill
Accessible design is good design.
- Steve Ballmer
War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.
- Mark Zuckerberg
If we do not have time to do it right the first time when will we have time to come back and do it right again later?
- Lee Cockerell
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
Consumers are spontaneous and if you can catch their attention, that’s going to increase the chance that they will look at your product.
- Jack Taylor
I get calls from everybody asking if I know of any drivers, anybody they can hire.
- Jack Taylor
Man will occasionally stumble upon the truth but most times he will pick himself up and continue on.
- Winston Churchill
I don’t have any opinions about Russians. There are celebrity persons in each country. Different people do different things.
- Alexei Mordashov
When I was 7, I came up with the idea of ‘charm socks.’ My mom would take me to buy bags of plastic charms, we would sew them on frilly white socks, and I sold them at school.
- Sara Blakely
If you don’t know how it works, find out. If you’re not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn’t make sense, play with it until it does. If it’s not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out.
- Seth Godin
I think growth covers up mistakes.
- Howard Schultz
The epidemic So many people are frozen in the face of uncertainty and paralyzed at the thought of shipping work that matters that one might think that the fear is hardwired into us. It is. Scientists can identify precisely where your lizard brain lives. This is your prehistoric early brain, the same brain that’s in the lizard or the deer. Filled with fear, intent on reproduction. Steven Pressfield gives the voice of the lizard brain a name: he calls it the resistance. And the resistance is talking to you as you read this, urging you to compromise, to not be an troublemaker, to avoid rash moves. For many of us, the resistance is always chattering away, frequently sabotaging our best opportunities and ruining our best chance to do great work. Naming it helps you befriend it, and befriending it helps you ignore it.
- Seth Godin
We can be certain that cities around the world will compete for the jobs that the next revival of the financial services industry will bring.
- Michael Bloomberg
The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.
- Bill Gates
Insufficient Education (not formal education).
- Napoleon Hill
People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.
- Benjamin Franklin
[B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell — a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great — was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing — namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. . . Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence — which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favour of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for would be not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that.
- Winston Churchill
Names are the sweetest, most important sound in any language.
- Dale Carnegie
Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: ‘I may be wrong. Let’s examine the facts.
- Dale Carnegie
Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.
- Rupert Murdoch
Those people blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.
- Mary Kay Ash
Canon is basically a very aggressive company. Our company works on competitive principles. It does not treat people equally, but it does treat them fairly.
- Fujio Mitarai
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
- Ben Horowitz
I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed…You only have to be right once…I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all.
- Mark Cuban
Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates’ colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.
- Peter Drucker
The best investments are on main street, not Wall Street.
- Robert P. Miles
I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.
- Warren Buffett
Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about.
- Winston Churchill
Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.
- Ray Kroc
If you don’t cut off negative information it will depress you. Step out of the natural and say, This may be impossible with men, but I know with God all things are possible.
- Joel Olsteen
Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember Life is too short to be little.
- Dale Carnegie
The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.
- Anthony Robbins
I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us- everything that exists – proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.
- Thomas Edison
Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
In the next two to three years there will probably be only three to five players in this area. The chances to gain or lose market share are exciting.
- John Chambers
His friends, drunk to the point of speaking in tongues, were asleep.
- Timothy Ferriss
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
- Bill Gates
I should be only paying for things that matter. I shouldn’t be paying for things that don’t matter. And, if Walgreen wants a premium, and they’re not doing anything different, why should I pay them more?
- George Paz
(Wright is) a visionary with a great strategic mind, and he’s a strong business leader with outstanding people skills, … He’s a terrific guy and will be a key force in guiding the company’s future growth.
- Jack Welch
We don’t have the luxury of time. We spend more because of how we live, but it’s important to be with our family and friends.
- Sara Blakely
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
- Ben Horowitz
Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.
- Bill Gates
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
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
- Steve Jobs
For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
- Peter Thiel
The McDonald brothers were simply not on my wavelength at all. I was obsessed with the idea of making McDonald’s the biggest and the best. They were content with what they had, they didn’t want to be bothered with more risks and more demands.
- Ray Kroc
If your message is not getting heard, then it doesn’t much matter what it is…Breaking through the clutter is such a powerful concept that even when it’s done badly it can still work. Once I graduated from college I needed a job quickly. I was applying to advertising agencies, so rather than send out a typical one-page resume, I made up this dinky little brochure. It had my picture on the front and on the back a little poem I had written about why someone should hire me… – David Novak CEO of Yum! Brands
- David Novak
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
- Jeff Bezos
Anyone that makes me a quarter of a billion dollars, I like.
- Carl Icahn
The minute there’s a map, there is no art. Paint by numbers is not art. Paint by numbers is a mechanical activity.
- Seth Godin
If you want to be obsessed to be your best, you must get ride of the negative things that are weighing you down.
- George Foreman
Every noteworthy achievement met with some sort of temporary setback before success came.
- Napoleon Hill
We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.
- Joel Olsteen
The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now.
- Zig Ziglar
Quite or be exceptional. Average is for losers.
- Seth Godin
One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace, good people don’t go into government.
- Donald Trump
I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.
- Phil Knight
The choice to be excellent begins with aligning your thoughts and words with the intention to require more from yourself.
- Oprah Winfrey
By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: ‘John, I’d love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I’ve got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said ‘no’ yesterday. Gotta run!
- Timothy Ferriss
Today’s stock price is X, tommorrow’s is up to you.
- Sam Walton
Later on, Rockefeller learned to camouflage his business anxiety behind a studied calm, but during these years it ws often graphically displayed. Clark remembered one daring venture when the firm wagered its entire capital on a large grain shipment to Buffalo. With foolish, atypical imprudence, Rockefeller suggested that they skip the insurance and pocket the $150.00 premium; Gardner and Clark reluctantly acquiesced. That night, a terrible storm blew across Lake Erie, and when Gardner came to the office the next morning, a frightfully pale Rockefeller paced the floor in agitation. Let’s take out insurance right away, he said, We still have time – if the boat hasn’t been wrecked by now. Gardner ran off to pay the premium. By the time he got back, Rockefeller was waving a telegram announcing the ship’s safe arrival in Buffalo. Whether unnerved by the episode or upset at having paid the unnecessary premium, Rockefeller went home ill that afternoon.
- Ron Chernow
I have lots of sources of information about what’s going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.
- Steve Ballmer
You can’t buy a good reputation, you must earn it.
- Harvey Mackay
If I had to do it over again, I would have done the same but earlier. It is never too early to start something. The sooner you begin, the sooner you get your experience.
- Warren Buffett
There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.
- Napoleon Hill
Starting a company is a very tough thing. There’s a friend of mine, Bill Lee, whose phrase is ‘starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.’ So you should certainly expect that it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be harder than getting a job somewhere by a pretty good margin and the odds of you losing the money that you invested or your friends invested is pretty high. I mean, those are just the basic facts. So if you don’t mind things being really hard and high risk, then starting a company is a good idea. Otherwise, it’s probably unwise. It will certainly stress you out. So I think you have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
- Elon Musk
I always say, ‘To have a big dream requires the same effort as having a small dream. Dream big!’
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
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
When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.
- Dale Carnegie
Money doesn’t make people happy. People make people happy.
- Stephen Wynn
It’s not about size, it’s about your ability to make a difference. At that small size, collaboration is all the more important.
- John Chambers
I shall pass this way but once. Therefore any good that I can do or any kindness that I can show-let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
- Dale Carnegie
John, never lend money to your friends; it will spoil your friendships.
- John D. Rockefeller
Money won’t make you happy… but everybody wants to find out for themselves.
- Zig Ziglar
Stubborn isn’t a word I would use to describe myself, pigheaded is more appropriate.
- Michael Bloomberg
If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.
- Harvey Mackay
The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)
- James C. Collins
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.
- Timothy Ferriss
These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.
- Winston Churchill
The ladder of success is never crowded at the top.
- Napoleon Hill
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
Game-playing is more fun when it’s virtual because you’re more successful. … in reality, only one person gets to be LeBron
- Larry Ellison
People buy titles, and not contents of books. By merely changing the name of one book that was not moving his sales on that book jumped upward more a million copies. The inside of the book was no changed in any way. He merely ripped off the cover bearing the title that did not sell, and put on new cover with a title that had box-office value.
- Napoleon Hill
