Notable Quotables

Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they’ve succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.

- Ben Horowitz

However old or young, have a mindset that enables us to capture all the opportunities that changes in the world are bringing to us.

- Cheng Yu-tung

We have merely scratched the surface of the store of knowledge which will come to us. I believe that we are now, a-tremble on the verge of vast discoveries – discoveries so wondrously important they will upset the present trend of human thought and start it along completely new lines .

- Thomas Edison

Anyone would fight for things that matter, true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter

- Peter Thiel

People tend to over-weigh risks on a personal level. It’s one thing if you’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids to support, so that if you were to deviate from your job, well, how are you going to feed your family and pay the rent? That’s understandable, but let’s say you’re young and you’re just coming out of college, what are your risks? You’re not going to starve, certainly not in any kind of modern economy. It’s so easy to earn enough money just to live somewhere and eat food. Very easy to do. So I don’t know what they’re afraid of. Mostly afraid of failure, I think, but people should be less risk averse, when there’s not much at risk.

- Elon Musk

I’m trying to throw a big broad net to try to get people interested in God and believe that He’s for them and has a purpose.

- Joel Olsteen

The world is facing a new networked, digital lifestyle, and we will ensure that Canon remains ahead of the game.

- Fujio Mitarai

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

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

- Bill Gates

The very important thing you should have is patience.

- Jack Ma

Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.

- Elon Musk

We can’t have democracy if we’re having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we’ve never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

- Larry Page

Men, women, and children who cannot live on gravity alone need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is, in my opinion, in a business established by the Creator of our nature. If he worthily fulfills his mission and amuses without corrupting, he need never feel that he has lived in vain.

- P.T. Barnum

To all of us comes that moment in life when we are literally tapped on the shoulder to do a very special thing unique to ourselves and our talents. What a pity if that moment finds us unprepared.

- Winston Churchill

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

- Peter Thiel

When I was growing up my dad would encourage my brother and me to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, so what did you guys fail at this week? If we didn’t have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he’d high-five me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn’t the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, I didn’t try that because I was scared, that is failure.

- Sara Blakely

We have to get control of our borders. You can only do that if you make companies obey the law and not hire undocumented or illegals. They can only do that is if they have a Social Security Card that has biometrics so they know whether the person is legal or not.

- Michael Bloomberg

You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.

- Lee Iacocca

Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.

- Donald Trump

Last I looked – and I’m not a candidate – but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It’s most states are winners take all.

- Michael Bloomberg

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.

- Herb Kelleher

Real entrepreneurs have what I call the three Ps (and, trust me, none of them stands for ‘permission’). Real entrepreneurs have a ‘passion’ for what they’re doing, a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved, and a ‘purpose’ that drives them forward.

- Michael Dell

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ is a good one because it not only turned out, I think, to be a really funny movie but it was also a delight to shoot. We were in the South of France, working with Glenne Headly and Michael Caine and Frank Oz the director – who were just fun.

- Steve Martin

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean, if a few drops of ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

- Mahatma Gandhi

I’m born into the cycle of giving that we’re all born into, and I recognize it. So just because something is a good business, I’m not a business guy. I’m a creative guy.

- Russell Simmons

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

- Mark Twain

We’ll be watching as the storm approaches. If we see a service area is about to be hit by high winds, we will literally have crews loaded and sitting in trucks, ready to go.

- Ed Clark

Delay taking a salary until your business is generating cash flow from sales…by delaying taking a salary, you can reinvest sales to help grow your business.

- Robert Kiyosaki

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

- Bill Gates

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.

- Winston Churchill

It’s no secret that we were sticking just above every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.

- Walt Disney

In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.

- Bill Gates

The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.

- Napoleon Hill

Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.

- Jack Welch

If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation.

- James C. Collins

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

If a product’s future is unlikely to be remarkable – if you can’t imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product – it’s time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.

- Seth Godin

If you’re single and you want to get married, put an empty photo album on your table. That’s where you’re going to put your wedding photos. When you see it, you’re moving toward it.

- Joel Olsteen

Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.

- P.T. Barnum

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.

- Mark Zuckerberg

For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.

- Dale Carnegie

Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.

- Warren Buffett

People have no confidence that Washington, both sides of aisle, are coming together to try and do what’s right for the economy.

- Michael Bloomberg

Keep in mind, just because you don’t know the answer doesn’t mean that one does not exist. You simply haven’t discovered it yet.

- Joel Olsteen

TV is a great big megaphone,” and when you can only afford to spend dozens of dollars acquiring a new customer, you need the biggest megaphone you can find.

- Peter Thiel

All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That’s why the word “salesman” can be a slur and the used car dealer is our archetype of shadiness. But we only react negatively to awkward, obvious salesmen—that is, the bad ones.

- Peter Thiel

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was… an arctic wilderness.

- Steve Martin

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without vicory there is no survival.

- Winston Churchill

I started thinking about joy. Everything in our society is so purposeful. Let’s bring joy back to the experience.

- Sara Blakely

[On his son Matt dying in 2004 in a scuba diving accident] It aged me much faster than anything you can imagine…

- Phil Knight

Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

- Bill Gates

This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.

- Peter Thiel

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

The thing for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I will see that you get it.

- Dale Carnegie

Drucker said: ‘If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?’ … Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.

- Jack Welch

Flavor is, counterintuitively, less than 10% taste and more than 90% smell.

- Timothy Ferriss

China’s movie industry is growing a lot faster than that of the U.S.

- Wang Jianlin

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.

- Bill Gates

Fact: If standard of living is your number one objective, quality of life almost never improves. But if quality of life is your number one objective, standard of living invariably improves.

- Zig Ziglar

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth. Not going all the way, and not starting.

- Siddhartha Gautama

Here’s the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don’t you hate that? I love that there’s no map.

- Seth Godin

Of course I needed somebody to run my new store, and I didn’t have much money, so I did something that I would do for the rest of my run in the retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent. That’s when I made my first real hire, the first manager, Willard Walker.

- Sam Walton

Today, we’re very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted – all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.

- Bill Gates

The nuclear approach I’m involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There’s a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true – many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

- Bill Gates

This is like the Six Sigma approach to quality. Six Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units. The problem is that once you’re heading down this road, there’s no room left for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. Either you rolled ten strikes or you didn’t. Organizations that earn dramatic success always do it in markets where asymptotes don’t exist, or where they can be shattered. If you could figure out how to bowl 320, that would be amazing. Until that happens, pick a different sport if you want to be a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

We’ve grown from 18% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry to 23% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry over the last five years. Profits are up over 70%, where the industry profit is up about 35%. Pretty good.

- Steve Ballmer

It’s quite complicated and sounds circular, but we’ve worked out a way of calculate a Web site’s importance.

- Larry Page

I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

- Jack Welch

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.

- Bill Gates

A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.

- James C. Collins

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

- Elon Musk

Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.

- Winston Churchill

A successful manager told me that stopped wearing a watch. She found that the work was so immersive, anchoring it to whatever hour it happened to be was pointless. The watch reminded her of the rigors of appointments and the status quo, while her goal was to be there, right here, right now, in the moment, and to do the work in front of her. The watch had no role in doing that right, so, for now, it’s gone.

- Seth Godin

We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.

- Walt Disney

People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.

- Ben Horowitz

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

- Bill Gates

I do not believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process

- Oprah Winfrey

There’s a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There’s a lot of sex, you know, in art. There’s a lot of naked women and men, and there’s intrigue, there’s fakery. It’s a real microcosm of the larger world.

- Steve Martin

Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.

- Oprah Winfrey

What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

- Peter Thiel

I was hooked and I would make reward and recognition one of my primary focuses as a leader

- David Novak

Wal-Mart is an amazing success story. What I particularly admire very much about the late Sam Walton was his policy of valuing his employees. Giving value to employees is very rare in the retail industry. I also admire the strategies Walton used to build up his discount store concept.

- Tadashi Yanai

To me, failure means not trying; failure isnt the outcome. If i have to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I didnt try that because I was scared,’ that is failure.

- Sara Blakely

A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

- Peter Thiel

Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new.

- Og Mandino

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