Notable Quotables

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

They need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Walmart on something like toothpaste. That’s not what they customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out front on the door and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and that register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Walmart tries to duplicate, ad we try awfully hard, we can’t really do it.

- Sam Walton

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

- Elon Musk

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

You won’t get anything unless you have the vision to imagine it.

- John Lennon

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

- Peter Drucker

One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions, your passions choose you.

- Jeff Bezos

Success is…knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.

- John C. Maxwell

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who’s going to build.

- Larry Ellison

I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.

- Bill Gates

Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.

- Warren Buffett

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, and do more and become more, you are a leader.

- John Quincy Adams

If you try to make such projects, unseen by others, as perfect as any human could, you’ll develop skills that other professionals don’t have.

- Steve Wozniak

95% financing arrangement offered by Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation Limited in a period of sustained low interest have added impetus to secondary trading activities in the property market.

- Lee Shau Kee

Every sale has 5 basic obstacles: need, money, hurry, desire, trust.

- Zig Ziglar

A company is like a shark, it either has to move forward or it dies.

- Larry Ellison

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.

- Warren Buffett

Companies such as Echelon are poised to help drive this change with Cisco and extend the power of the Internet from business to the home.

- John Chambers

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.

- Elon Musk

We don’t live in a normal world, we live under a power law.

- Peter Thiel

For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate.

- Peter Thiel

You have everything to gain and nothing to lose by trying. Success is achieved and maintained by those who keep trying with a positive mental attitude.

- Napoleon Hill

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend … if you have one.”— George Bernard Shaw, playwright (to Winston Churchill)”Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”— Churchill’s response.

- Winston Churchill

The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers

- Sam Walton

The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.

- Bill Gates

You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself.

- Napoleon Hill

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.

- Napoleon Hill

Exercise is better than any medicine I can take, exercise and sleep.

- Aliko Dangote

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

- Jerry Seinfeld

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

- Winston Churchill

It may look impossible, but God can do the impossible. Just because you don’t see anything happening doesn’t mean God is not working.

- Joel Olsteen

Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.

- Steve Ballmer

I can walk through a hotel lobby and watch people at the desk and see what they’re doing. People don’t look at me. They don’t even know I’m there.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Great companies are built on great products.

- Elon Musk

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

- Peter Thiel

If you have your health, if you have people in your life to love, you are blessed. Slow down and enjoy the simple things in life.

- Joel Olsteen

A lot of preachers’ kids are some of the most rebellious kids in the world. I never was like that.

- Joel Olsteen

You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.

- Winston Churchill

Management always bears in mind to ‘lend a hand’ to Hong Kong and Mainland China while we are working hard for shareholders’ benefits.

- Cheng Yu-tung

A smart, motivational good manager can work what some outsiders call Wal-Mart magic with folks everywhere. It make take more time. You may have to sift through more people, and you may have to become more skilled with your hiring practices. But I truly believe that people anywhere will eventually respond to the same sorts of motivational techniques we use, if they are treated right and are given the opportunities to be properly trained. If you are good to people, and fair with them, and demanding of them, they will eventually decide you’re on their side.

- Sam Walton

Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.

- John C. Maxwell

When you go through a disappointment, when you go through a loss, don’t stop on that page. Keep moving forward. There’s another chapter in front of you, but you have to be willing to walk into it.

- Joel Olsteen

We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.

- Jeff Bezos

Learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.

- Jack Welch

From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.

- Elon Musk

Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.

- Napoleon Hill

Property prices depend mainly on the supply and demand of a particular point in time, in much the same way as the price for a commodity is fixed.

- Lee Shau Kee

“Everyone will think it’s stupid!””Everyone says it’s impossible.”Guess what? Everyone works in the balloon factory and everyone is wrong.

- Seth Godin

If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: 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

Encouragement and hope are the two most powerful qualities any person can provide to others.

- Zig Ziglar

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

A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing.

- Phil Knight

That’s why encouragement is a much more effective teaching device than punishment.

- Dale Carnegie

There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.

- Phil Knight

God, You said Your favor is not for a season but for a lifetime.

- Joel Olsteen

Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.

- Dale Carnegie

About three million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

- Bill Gates

If you’ve found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.

- Bill Gates

Of this I am quite sure. If we open up a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

- Winston Churchill

Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night.

- Thomas Edison

We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

- Peter Thiel

I’ve always been very happy. I’ve always been easy going and I’ve always been very encouraging, it’s just my personality.

- Joel Olsteen

One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life.

- Napoleon Hill

Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.

- James C. Collins

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

The expensive act of planning on late When you’re late, there’s not a lot of room for choice or decision or initiative. When you’re late, the path is well lit, and the choices are clear. Run! Run down the path you’ve run down before. Late is a tool for people unable to find the guts to stand for their acts. Late gives us cover; it permits us to trample forward, without creativity or panache. “Can’t you see I’m late!” we shout, as we do what we have to do, without even pausing to think about what we could do instead. Late might be useful, except that late is incredibly expensive. This strategy, the one we choose so we can avoid the fear of choice, costs us in so many ways. It degrades quality, misses airplanes, charges overtime, and shuts down those around us. It’s also exhausting. The alternative to planning on late is to initiate before it’s required, to ship before deadline, to put the idea out there before the crisis hits. This act of bravery actually gives you influence, leverage, and control in a way that planning on late never can.

- Seth Godin

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

- Winston Churchill

You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies – all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.

- Steve Martin

Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.

- Thomas Edison

I’m pretty good at sticking to what I know. You don’t see me social commentating on health-care or presidential debates. I talk about what I know because I’m petrified of being wrong.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.

- Bill Gates

The torch relay is an excellent embodiment of all that the Olympic Games have come to symbolise – a celebration of the human spirit. Personally to me, it represents striving to be the best in whatever we do, never giving up despite the odds, and a commitment to health and fitness.

- Lakshmi Mittal

There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Mike suggested that we might want to turn our stockholders’ meetings into an event, and we went along with him.

- Sam Walton

by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined.

- James C. Collins

Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

- Dale Carnegie

[On Twitter and Japan] We’ve had massive success in Japan… In Japan, it’s not 140 characters, it’s 140 words. So you could write a little mini-novel. This is a whole story in the universe.

- Jack Dorsey

There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late.

- Og Mandino

There’s room for another planet between Mars and Jupiter. Given that planets formed everywhere else, why couldn’t another planet have formed there?

- John Chambers

When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.

- Joel Olsteen

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

- Napoleon Hill

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

This country provides opportunities. If you don’t take advantage of them, it’s your own fault.

- Sam Huff

The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.

- Joel Olsteen

Passion is everything. In fact, you’ve got to be borderline fanatical about what you do.

- Chris Gardner

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