Notable Quotables

After putting economics aside, I found that there were two primary reasons why people quit: They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving. They weren’t learning anything: The company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills.

- Ben Horowitz

I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.

- Jerry Seinfeld

To reach your full potential, you have to set goals that will stretch you.

- Zig Ziglar

Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.

- Peter Thiel

A Carnegie or a Rockefeller or a James J. Hill or a Marshall Field accumulates a fortune through the applications of the same principles available to all of us, but we envy them and their wealth without ever thinking of studying their philosophy and applying it to ourselves. We look at a successful person in the hour of their triumph and wonder how they did it, but we overlook the importance of analyzing their methods. And we forget the price they had to pay in the careful, well-organized preparation that had to be made before they could reap the fruits of their efforts.

- Napoleon Hill

It’s the next opportunity that keeps us motivated.

- Zig Ziglar

When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, ‘Let’s get a better board’ can be helpful.

- Ben Horowitz

Much to learn you still have…my old padawan… This is just the beginning!

- Yoda

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

If a job doesn’t excite you on some level—just because of the stuff of it—don’t settle.

- Jack Welch

GE’s businesses turned in a terrific first quarter. Our products and services are being well received in unusually robust global markets.

- Jack Welch

Once Microsoft lost its grip on developers, it became only a matter of time before it lost its monopoly on operating systems.

- Ben Horowitz

One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it’s making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it’s the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you’re dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.

- Reid Hoffman

Chance made us sisters. Hearts made us friends.

- Zig Ziglar

California, in a sense, is almost Starbucks’ largest country, with almost 3,000 stores

- Howard Schultz

Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.

- Zig Ziglar

My friend didn’t understand what it means to be in the world, to be present and aware.

- Seth Godin

I’m not as interested in what you make as I am in what you’re passionate about. What business are you really in?

- Howard Schultz

If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.

- Warren Buffett

You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It wont happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, ‘I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.

- Joel Olsteen

On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.

- Seth Godin

If one dream dies, dream another dream. If you get knocked down, get back up and go again.

- Joel Olsteen

In Hong Kong, the property business has always been very competitive, so we have to think of ways to get an edge over our competitors.

- Raymond Kwok

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.

- Warren Buffett

Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.

- Yoda

Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.

- Peter Thiel

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

God doesn’t look at how much we do, but with how much love we do it.

- Mother Teresa

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

When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.

- Zig Ziglar

Steve Jobs had very strong feelings about what makes a company great, what makes products great. He more or less chose Tim Cook to be in that role, in that position.

- Steve Wozniak

you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.

- Timothy Ferriss

You embrace the top 20, deal with the middle 70, and you face into the bottom 10, and you do what’s right for them and for you.

- Jack Welch

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

If people talk about you, being jealous, critical, and trying to make you look bad, don’t let that change you. You don’t need their approval when you have God’s approval.

- Joel Olsteen

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade – and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.

- George Soros

Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.

- Yoda

I’ve always thought if we don’t want to enforce laws on the books, we should remove them from the books. But when you have laws, you breed contempt if you don’t enforce them.

- Michael Bloomberg

Measuring and establishing facts at every step of the process. Without facts, assumptions and misperceptions will defeat whatever reason and good judgment can be brought to effort

- Service Profit Chain

So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.

- Thomas Edison

Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic. The best way to approach a potential break is simple: Confide in them honestly but tactfully and explain your concerns. If they bite back, your conclusions have been confirmed. Drop them like any other bad habit. If they promise to change, first spend at least two weeks apart to develop other positive influences in your life and diminish psychological dependency. The next trial period should have a set duration and consist of pass-or-fail criteria. If this approach is too confrontational for you, just politely refuse to interact with them. Be in the middle of something when the call comes, and have a prior commitment when the invitation to hang out comes. Once you see the benefits of decreased time with these people, it will be easier to stop communication altogether.

- Timothy Ferriss

Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.

- Jack Welch

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

It’s absolutely a necessary and inevitable evolution in retailing (of Wal-Mart putting small stores out of business), as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car, and the dissappearance of the buggy whip makers. The small stores (and DJs) were destined to dissappear, at least in the numbers they once existed., because the whole thing is driven by customers, who are free to choose where to shop.

- Sam Walton

Study, along the lines which the theologies have mapped, will never lead us to discovery of the fundamental facts of our existence. That goal must be attained by means of exact science and can only be achieved by such means. The fact that man, for ages, has superstitiously believed in what he calls a God does not prove at all that his theory has been right. There have been many gods – all makeshifts, born of inability to fathom the deep fundamental truth. There must be something at the bottom of existence, and man, in ignorance, being unable to discover what it is through reason, because his reason has been so imperfect, undeveloped, has used, instead, imagination, and created figments, of one kind or another, which, according to the country he was born in, the suggestions of his environment, satisfied him for the time being. Not one of all the gods of all the various theologies has ever really been proved. We accept no ordinary scientific fact without the final proof; why should we, then, be satisfied in this most mighty of all matters, with a mere theory?Destruction of false theories will not decrease the sum of human happiness in future, any more than it has in the past… The days of miracles have passed. I do not believe, of course, that there was ever any day of actual miracles. I cannot understand that there were ever any miracles at all. My guide must be my reason, and at thought of miracles my reason is rebellious. Personally, I do not believe that Christ laid claim to doing miracles, or asserted that he had miraculous power…Our intelligence is the aggregate intelligence of the cells which make us up. There is no soul, distinct from mind, and what we speak of as the mind is just the aggregate intelligence of cells. It is fallacious to declare that we have souls apart from animal intelligence, apart from brains. It is the brain that keeps us going. There is nothing beyond that.Life goes on endlessly, but no more in human beings than in other animals, or, for that matter, than in vegetables. Life, collectively, must be immortal, human beings, individually, cannot be, as I see it, for they are not the individuals – they are mere aggregates of cells.There is no supernatural. We are continually learning new things. There are powers within us which have not yet been developed and they will develop. We shall learn things of ourselves, which will be full of wonders, but none of them will be beyond the natural.

- Thomas Edison

When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?

- Jack Welch

It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming.

- Timothy Ferriss

Newspaper readership is still growing in India.

- Bill Gates

The most stable companies have strong leaders at every level of the organization. The only way to develop such widespread leadership is to make developing leaders a part of your culture. That is a strong part of Coca-Cola’s legacy.

- John Maxwell

I had a will to win that come from being raised poor.

- Sam Huff

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

- Thomas Edison

The earnings from Hong Kong and China Gas and rental property portfolio serve as a solid base for the Group’s sustainable growth.

- Lee Shau Kee

Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.

- Ben Horowitz

When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.

- Thomas Edison

The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.

- Peter Thiel

Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.What makes someone an artist? I don’t think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren’t artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.That’s why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That’s why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He’s an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn’t care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it’s important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does.Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.

- Seth Godin

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The arrival of the 21st century precedes the onslaught of turmoil and tsunami. The business environment has become unpredictable and the global economy even harsher…

- Cheng Yu-tung

I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Outlook 2003 did create the idea of search folders and the whole Longhorn philosophy. You can see it at work in search folders, where instead of having to drop things into individual folders, and things exist only in one folder, you create these search folders and you have the criteria for the search folder.

- Bill Gates

An enterprise shall take care of the people’s livelihood, through thick and thin…

- Cheng Yu-tung

I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t go and continue to use every advantage that I can to promote New York’s cause.

- Michael Bloomberg

The sooner you accept the fact that you will have both successes and failures, the easier it will be to get your business and personal life headed in the right direction.

- Harvey Mackay

I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.

- Dale Carnegie

You are the only person on earth who can use your ability. It’s an awesome responsibility.

- Zig Ziglar

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.

- David Packard

If you’re a Wal-Mart of a Meijer you can draw the shoppers without using signs to advertise your specials, … But when you’re a little guy, you really depend on those signs.

- Michael Ward

What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

- Elon Musk

Dreams are extremely important. You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

- George Lucas

Anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble.

- Peter Thiel

There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.

- Napoleon Hill

We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.

- Steve Ballmer

Let go of offence. Let go of fear. Let go of revenge. Don’t live angry, let go now!

- Joel Olsteen

It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

- Peter Thiel

I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.

- Seth Godin

Countries which receive aid do graduate. Within a generation, Korea went from being a big recipient to being a big aid donor. China used to get quite a bit of aid; now it’s aid-neutral.

- Bill Gates

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

- Steve Martin

They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.

- Winston Churchill

If you’re going to have to swallow a frog, you don’t want to have to look at that sucker too long!

- Zig Ziglar

Many times, we miss out on God’s best because we give up too soon. We don’t realize how close we are to victory.

- Joel Olsteen

How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?

- Seth Godin

If we say it long enough eventually we’re going to reap a harvest. We’re going to get exactly what we’re saying.

- Joel Olsteen

It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.

- Winston Churchill

People might not think that, but the Republicans have all of the cards. And this is the time to get rid of Obamacare. This is the time to make the great deal.

- Donald Trump

I am a tightwad. That’s one of the main reasons I completed a long questionnaire for a crispy $1 bill. Why else would I spend two or three hours being personally interviewed by these authors? They paid me $100, $200, or $250. Oh, they made me another offer–to donate in my name the money I earned for my interview to my favorite charity. But I told them, I am my favorite charity.

- Thomas J Stanley

People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

- Peter Drucker

Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market. That starts with asking yourself: what will the world look like 10 and 20 years from now, and how will my business fit in?

- Peter Thiel

Allow yourself to get on the same side of the desk and solve the problems together.

- Jack Nadel

If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio’s market value

- Warren Buffett

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