Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.
- Professor Harry A. Overstreet
That was so much fun. It’s been such a neat experience racing with these guys.
- Ed Clark
What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do some thing about them.
- Henry Ford
The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.
- Bill Gates
To create a big company, you need more partners, as it is hard to handle such a project alone. Such projects bring access to the expertise and management resources of the partners, and their connections above all.
- Vladimir Potanin
Believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.
- Seth Godin
In those days he was wiser than he is now, he used to frequently take my advice.
- Winston Churchill
We need to show mercy. I mean, because as much mercy as you show people, that’s the mercy you’re going to be receiving.
- Joel Olsteen
Perhaps we have been guilty of some terminological inexactitudes.
- Winston Churchill
Company culture” doesn’t exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.
- Peter Thiel
People around the world, they want the authentic Starbucks experience.
- Howard Schultz
To a child love is spelled T-I-M-E.
- Zig Ziglar
For people who are readers, reading is important to them.
- Jeff Bezos
If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.
- Reid Hoffman
Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.
- Andrew Carnegie
If you don’t set the tone for the day, the devil will set it for you.
- Joel Olsteen
Always render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be.
- Og Mandino
I’d say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that’s a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.
- Herb Kelleher
In fact, stories only magnify the need to have something remarkable (and honest) to say.
- Seth Godin
There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
- Peter Thiel
Well, we have to provide the world’s best schools. We certainly don’t have them, but that’s our objective.
- Michael Bloomberg
The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.
- Bill Gates
True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.
- Zig Ziglar
Most good ideas are already out there, and to learn about them, all you have to do is ask the right people.
- David Novak
I don’t think we like the precedent of it, and so we’re fighting it. I think we’re right.
- Sergey Brin
That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
- Peter Thiel
If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that’s not going to promote healthiness.
- Larry Page
When you have an understanding of how someone else lives, the less likely it is that you conflict with them.
- Jack Dorsey
Make youself necessary to someone.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The biggest part of my job now is to quickly develop successors, and around the world I am working to develop new business leaders in the company.
- Tadashi Yanai
In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.
- Clayton M. Christensen
If we don’t end war, war will end us.
- Winston Churchill
Kids instinctively know – although they will argue to the contrary – that they really are not mature enough to make good decisions on some important issues.
- Zig Ziglar
A lack of realism in the vision today costs credibility tomorrow.
- John C. Maxwell
Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of his followers.
- Napoleon Hill
The choice to have a great attitude is something that nobody or no circumstance can take from you.
- Zig Ziglar
The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat.
- Napoleon Hill
Percentage margins don’t matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.
- Jeff Bezos
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
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
- Peter Drucker
What material success does is provide you with the ability to concentrate on other things that really matter. And that is being able to make a difference, not only in your own life, but in other people’s lives.
- Oprah Winfrey
Pain, suffering, death I feel. Something terrible has happened. Young Skywalker is in pain. Terrible pain.
- Yoda
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together.
- Peter Thiel
Dr. Franklin says “it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.
- P.T. Barnum
Become genuinely interested in other people.
- Dale Carnegie
Being able to see an activity log of where a kid has been going on the Internet is a good thing.
- Bill Gates
If you’re a person struggling to eat and stay healthy, you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you’ll never have heard of Bill Gates.
- Bill Gates
It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people. You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.
- Peter Thiel
This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: —There spread a cloud of dust along a plainAnd underneath the cloud, or in it, ragedA furious battle, and men yelled, and swordsShocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s bannerWavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.A craven hung along the battle’s edge,And thought, Had I a sword of keener steel —That blue blade that the king’s son bears, — but thisBlunt thing! — he snapt and flung it from his hand,And lowering crept away and left the field.Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shoutLifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down,And saved a great cause that heroic day.
- Edward Rowland Sill
I loved couriers. You had this transfer of physical information happening throughout the city and the world. Someone picking up the package, putting it in a bag, going somewhere, taking it out of the bag, giving it to someone else. I thought that was so cool. I wanted to map it, to see that flow on a big screen.
- Jack Dorsey
I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.
- Elon Musk
If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.
- Jack Welch
It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.
- Henry Ford
You will find only what you bring in.
- Yoda
Don’t criticize them, they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.
- Dale Carnegie
Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.
- Peter Drucker
You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth.
- Winston Churchill
The more we share what’s happening around us, the more we understand how someone lives their life. The greater the understanding we have, the more empathy we have for each other. By and large, that reduces conflicts.
- Jack Dorsey
We are in control of the one asset that we all give the most f#%ks about, and that is time.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Levi Strauss headed for the gold fields of California to strike it rich in mining. However, he was not a good miner, so he instead began sewing pants out of canvas for the miners who were successful. Today I think most of the world has heard of Levi’s pants.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.
- Reed Hastings
Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don’t let these feelings stop them.
- T. Harv Eker
Records are made to be broken. It is in man’s nature to continue to strive to do just that.
- Richard Branson
I want to help people to help themselves, which is much more valuable for both sides than just making a donation. By training the child of a farmer you compound the value of that dollar spent on training since that child will now help their parents. This is the multiplier effect. There’s no point in just feeding them or just giving them money.
- Lee Shau Kee
Few startup advisers and venture capitalists have any experience.
- Ben Horowitz
They were going to get it all right the first time right… Open to change.
- Jack Dorsey
Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
- Marilyn vos Savant
Profitability is a shallow goal if it doesn’t have a real purpose, and the purpose has to be share the profits with others.
- Howard Schultz
For me, my father was, and still is, a symbol of qualified persons in the Ministry of Foreign Trade under Soviet conditions.
- Vladimir Potanin
If you are a big company, a big website, and lots of users come to your website, you will have attacks, and you have to deal with that. It just cannot be a reason to take actions to exit certain markets.
- Robin Li
Even if you have a world class idea and want to give it away for the good of humanity, you will have to sell the concept. If you can’t sell it, you’ll be stuck with your idea, poorer for your brilliance and generosity.
- Jerry Vass
Be happy with who God made you to be, and quit wishing you were something different.
- Joel Olsteen
One who starts a business without written plans of any kind, without a pro-forma or any concept of their overall profitability per customer, yet believes that if they work hard enough and give enough money away to those in need that eventually they will not be in need.
- Clay Clark
When you learn to listen to your fear, you’ve found a compass that can show you what matters.
- Seth Godin
Although we can’t predict the future, our orders for the first weeks of this quarter are in line with the expectations we discussed in our fourth quarter earnings call.
- John Chambers
Follow your instincts. That’s where true wisdom manifests itself.
- Oprah Winfrey
I love art, I love design, and I love seeing that intersection of technology and the teams that work on it.
- Jack Dorsey
The higher the level of leadership people want to reach, the greater the sacrifices they will have to make?
- John Maxwell
It is true that integrity alone won’t make you a leader, but without integrity you will never be one.
- Zig Ziglar
You have to have a dream, whether big or small. Then plan, focus, work hard and be very determined to achieve your goals.
- Henry Sy
Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end.
- Walt Disney
I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical.
- Bill Gates
There is no such thing in the world as luck. There never was a man who could go out in the morning and find a purse full of gold in the street to-day, and another to-morrow, and so on, day after day: He may do so once in his life; but so far as mere luck is concerned, he is as liable to lose it as to find it.
- P.T. Barnum
Your job should make you want to get out of bed
- Tony Hsieh
Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
- Winston Churchill
If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning.
- Larry Page
The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.
- Dale Carnegie
I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.
- Joel Olsteen
Deep knowledge from your manager goes a long way toward motivating you. And I have a pretty good capability for that.
- Larry Page
Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.
- Larry Ellison
Will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer, instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.
- Peter Thiel
[In February 2011 on Square.] Starting a startup after twitter is so much easier than before.
- Jack Dorsey
Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
- Henry Ford
Well, I am a Republican, and I would run as a Republican. And I have a lot of confidence in the Republican Party. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the president. I think what’s happening to this country is unbelievably bad. We’re no longer a respected country.
- Donald Trump
The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.
- Seth Godin
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
Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.
- Clayton M. Christensen
