Notable Quotables

At the start of any business, keeping the cash flowing in is the entrepreneur’s most IMPORTANT JOB.

- Robert Kiyosaki

To grow your company explosively you must have leaders, not just efficient managers.

- John Maxwell

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

Personal discipline, when it becomes a way of life in our personal, family, and career lives, will enable us to do some incredible things.

- Zig Ziglar

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

- Bill Gates

All my friends ask me, ‘Am I number one in the world in [receiving] dividend payments?’ I say, ‘I don’t know, ask Forbes.’

- Lee Shau Kee

This marks the eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year top-line growth for Cisco.

- John Chambers

Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.

- Joel Olsteen

Nothing in life has happened to you. It’s happened for you. Every disappointment. Every wrong. Even every closed door has helped make you into who you are.

- Joel Olsteen

That’s an issue dear to my heart, because I was born in the Soviet Union during the communist era.

- Sergey Brin

George W. Bush stated, I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation. That’s when I knew Bush was headed for trouble. With all due respect for the office, I completely disagree with him. In my view, it’s the leader’s responsibility to explain his or her actions every step of the way. And the higher up you are, the more important it is.

- David Novak

The Effective Executive itself is not a book on what people at the top do or should do. It is addressed to everyone who, as a knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization

- Peter Drucker

Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards–and living up to them–is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.

- Seth Godin

I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft.

- Steve Ballmer

Every patient is a consumer, and every consumer is a potential patient. What NantWorks is doing is building the world the way Da Vinci saw it, and augmenting every frame a human being sees as they work, live and play.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Whether you’re 9 or 90, stop trying to fix the things you’re bad at, and focus on the things you’re good at.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that good ones slip through.

- Seth Godin

On behalf of the employees of Cisco, we send our deepest sympathy and condolences to all of those affected by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, … This has been a crushing blow to the residents of the Gulf Coast and we stand by them, ready to help.

- John Chambers

Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.

- Dale Carnegie

The formula for handling Inherent Objections: 1. Isolate the Objection 2. Minimize the Objection 3. Offset the Objection with Benefits

- Jerry Vass

But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.

- Winston Churchill

Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right.

- Dale Carnegie

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we will fall, but ‘when.’ There are no exceptions.

- John C. Maxwell

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win — you’re still a rat.

- Lily Tomlin

If you really believe that you’re making a difference and that you can leave a legacy of better schools and jobs and safer streets, why would you not spend the money? The objective is to improve the schools, bring down crime, build affordable housing, clean the streets – not to have a fair fight.

- Michael Bloomberg

Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.

- Yoda

I was not strong enough to defeat him. Like his master before him, be destroyed, he must.

- Yoda

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

Even though people are under economic pressure, they still want to support those brands with values that are compatible with their own.

- Howard Schultz

You are going to survive. And good things are going to start to happen again. And one day you are going to look back and this will not even be such a bad thing.

- Dale Carnegie

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.

- Peter Drucker

Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that.

- Steve Ballmer

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner’s job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one’s own property.

- Peter Drucker

The one essential character trait of any leader is personal integrity.

- David Novak

If you’re using first-class land for biofuels, then you’re competing with the growing of food. And so you’re actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

- Bill Gates

Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.

- Ben Horowitz

One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon – instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

- Dale Carnegie

The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

- Peter Thiel

Well I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

- Richard Branson

Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.

- Henry Ford

If Google Books is successful, others will follow.

- Sergey Brin

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

You are going to fire Mark Hurd and hire Leo? What I said at the time was that this was the best idea since the Apple board fired Steve Jobs. Really brilliant.

- Larry Ellison

And being as wicked as any man who ever lived, he exploited his advantage to the full.

- Winston Churchill

The world today is ruled by harassed politicians absorbed in getting into office or turning out the other man so that not much room is left for debating the great issues on their merits.

- Winston Churchill

The most expensive piece of real estate is the six inches between your right and left ear. It’s what you create in that area that determines your wealth. We are only really limited by our mind.

- Dr. Dolf de Roos

As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world.

- Rupert Murdoch

Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

- Ben Horowitz

Don’t romance Wall Street. You don’t want investors who are only concerned about the quarter, or who are working on their exit strategy from day one. You want shareholders to own you forever. If we have no trading at all, I consider that a tremendous accomplishment.

- Warren Buffett

If you are going to run a successful business you are going to have to be committed to your customers 100% of the time. If customers consistently tell you that they don’t like a certain product or service you offer or an employee that you have working for you, you must be willing to act based upon their feedback if you find it to be factual.

- Clay Clark

They did not die because of sickness or anything but because of hunger. I remember that and how people suffered.

- Lui Che Woo

Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.

- Oprah Winfrey

Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.

- Phil Knight

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

- Andrew Carnegie

I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know anything about the speaker so there’s nothing that makes me want to get up early and go to it. I might catch it on TV.

- John Chambers

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We hav before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I answer in one word: Victory…victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is not survival. Letter to Hitler

- Winston Churchill

Cold steel and discipline and the slight capital surplus necessary to move and organise armies constituted the sole defences.

- Winston Churchill

I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn’t been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn’t have been lucky

- Oprah Winfrey

A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.

- John D. Rockefeller

The thing about fashion – it’s like ducks going quack, quack quack. It’s being dictated from above, and it just makes me want to rebel against it.

- Sara Blakely

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

Without passion, you don’t have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

- Donald Trump

I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.

- Larry Page

We base our investment strategies on quality, trust, synergy and initiative.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don’t know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.

- Sam Walton

Good advertising should give the reader essential facts about the product or company advertised and should do so engagingly without trickery or hogwash.

- Leo Burnett

The annals of business are filled with stories of companies that thought they had it made and could milk their enterprises without having to bother about improving their products or services. It’s amazing how fast they found their markets disappearing.

- Harvey Mackay

Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.

- Timothy Ferriss

If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

- Larry Page

China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country but we turned them into coffee drinkers.

- Howard Schultz

Churchill: The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labor Party): “If that had happened we should have lost the 1939 -45 war”.Churchill: No, it would have prevented that war.

- Winston Churchill

God didn’t make a mistake when He made you. You need to see yourself as God sees you.

- Joel Olsteen

Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants, comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.

- Winston Churchill

You can win more friends with your ears than with your mouth. People who feel like they’re being listened to feel accepted and appreciated. They feel like they’re being taken seriously and what they say really matters.

- Harvey Mackay

Specifically, the following things that cause no trouble when you are small become big challenges as you grow: Communication Common knowledge Decision making.

- Ben Horowitz

The people of Southwest have always been my pride, my joy and my love. Their indomitable dedication and esprit de corps have taken Southwest from a three-airplane dream to a 500-airplane reality.

- Herb Kelleher

Man’s only limitation within reason lies in his development and use of his imagination

- Napoleon Hill

“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it eventually, just do it and correct course along the way.

- Timothy Ferriss

By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.

- Bill Gates

I’m anti-tax, but I’m pro-carbon tax.

- Elon Musk

I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.

- Larry Ellison

Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.

- Winston Churchill

So what we do every Monday is review the whole business…I put out an agenda – 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.

- Steve Jobs

It’s harder, but we’re still finding oil in Oklahoma today. The bar has been raised on startup companies, but it can still be done. Every regulation and every rule limits you, but, yes, it can still be done. That’s the beauty of living in a free country and having the freedom to have an idea and become an entrepreneur.

- Harold Hamm

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

- Seth Godin

I’ve got to confess I’m a pragmatic optimist myself.

- Zig Ziglar

Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards- the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

- Walt Disney

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription