Notable Quotables

I feel good about being able to take bluegrass on to television like ‘Letterman’ and ‘The View,’ and I’ve heard nice things about being able to do that. I really haven’t felt any negativity toward me or my music.

- Steve Martin

If you believe in quality, you can’t just tell everybody We believe in quality! You’ve got to pay bonuses based on quality. You’ve got to let everyone in the organization know that they are being judged on quality.

- Jack Welch

The smartest business decision you can make is to hire qualified people. Bringing the right people on board saves you thousands, and your business will run smoothly and efficiently.

- Brian Tracy

This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

- Peter Drucker

Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.

- Bill Gates

Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.

- Oprah Winfrey

Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself.

- Dale Carnegie

The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met are all good communicators. It’s perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.

- Timothy Ferriss

You can’t worry about the mistakes, because you’re going to make a lot of them. You’ve got to be thinking about your next move.

- Ben Horowitz

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.

- Elon Musk

This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.

- Peter Thiel

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

- Joel Olsteen

Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress—stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.

- Timothy Ferriss

What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.

- Admiral Jim Stockdale

I worry about losing a real talent. I hate losing a great leader more than anything. I also hate it when I have to manager out a good person for poor performance or for simply doing something that is not in sync with our values. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life and I’ve had to do it more than once, is fire a friend.

- David Novak

By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.

- Lee Shau Kee

The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there’s just so many expectations on you, and there are so many people who have things that they want you to do. It’s a lot like life about that.

- Ben Horowitz

Most business people today are not going to invest in the uncertainty that exists in America.

- Howard Schultz

If you want to reach a goal, you must ‘see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.

- Zig Ziglar

If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.

- Elon Musk

If you are unduly nervous, turn it around make your vulnerability an asset.

- Michael Levine

Little phrases such as ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ ‘Would you be so kind as to –?’ ‘Won’t you please?’ ‘Would you mind?’ ‘Thank you’ – little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life – and incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

- Dale Carnegie

When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.

- Napoleon Hill

When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.

- Peter Thiel

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.

- Winston Churchill

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.

It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.

- Winston Churchill

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

- 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

God accepts you. God approves you. And He has something better in store.

- Joel Olsteen

Cultural industries will be the next engine for growth after real estate, and Wanda will make cultural industries our long-term focus.

- Wang Jianlin

I have asked thousands of business people to smile at someone every hour of the day for a week and then come to class and talk about the results.

- Dale Carnegie

Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.

- Mark Zuckerberg

You don’t make spending decisions, investment decisions, hiring decisions, or whether-you’re-going-to-look-for-a-job decisions when you don’t know what’s going to happen.

- Michael Bloomberg

We’re taking these steps because of the continuing slowdown in the U.S. economy and initial signs of a slowdown expanding to other parts of the world.

- John Chambers

That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.

- Peter Thiel

First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

- Peter Thiel

Very important people have told me that they prefer good listeners to good talkers, but the ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait.

- Dale Carnegie

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

- Bill Gates

Assume employees are going across a lot of networks. So you have to build in security from the home to any number of networks.

- John Chambers

Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.

- Andrew Carnegie

Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men. Moreover it must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil.

- Winston Churchill

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

It’s hard to improve public education – that’s clear.

- Bill Gates

You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once.

- Oprah Winfrey

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation.

- Bill Gates

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.

- Napoleon Hill

But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.

- Peter Thiel

Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

- Peter Thiel

If you’re going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don’t work.

- Seth Godin

Some questions that I’ve found to be very effective in one-on-ones: If we could improve in any way, how would we do it? What’s the number-one problem with our organization? Why? What’s not fun about working here? Who is really kicking ass in the company? Whom do you admire? If you were me, what changes would you make? What don’t you like about the product? What’s the biggest opportunity that we’re missing out on? What are we not doing that we should be doing? Are you happy working here?

- Ben Horowitz

The garden gleams with summer jewelry. We live vy simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & well provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy.

- Winston Churchill

It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance in this world. The great man or woman is the one who never steps outside his or her specialty or foolishly dissipates his or her individuality.

- Og Mandino

Many brilliant people believe that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains, ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.

- Peter Drucker

Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.

- W. Clement Stone

In reality it is the focus on the first three D’s that ultimately gains you the data, and the dollars you need to become very, very rich…in other words the dollars are derived from having a dream, being dedicated, and having the drive to win.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Nike is not about going to a ball game. It’s a business.

- Phil Knight

I’m so optimistic, I’d go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take the tartar sauce with me.

- Zig Ziglar

I can’t read a computer screen and never use a calculator. It’s all in my head and by hand.

- Simon Reuben

Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don’t show up. They want to be missed when they’re gone.

- Seth Godin

A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still.

- Dale Carnegie

In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

- Ben Horowitz

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.

- Zig Ziglar

Don’t fall in love with your wit. Your cleverly turned phrase may not, as you hope, show off how much gray matter you have, especially if the phrase is at someone else’s expense.

- Harvey Mackay

The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.

- Phil Knight

The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn’t always where you want to use it, and it isn’t always when you want to use it.

- Bill Gates

The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

- Napoleon Hill

My first job. Ah, the memories. I’m hired for minimum wage as the cleaner at an ice cream parlor and quickly realize that the big boss’s methods duplicate effort. I do it my way, finish in one hour instead of eight, and spend the rest of the time reading kung-fu magazines and practicing karate kicks outside. I am fired in a record three days, left with the parting comment, Maybe someday you’ll understand the value of hard work.” It seems I still don’t.

- Timothy Ferriss

When I’m bored or tired of being blonde, I’ll throw on a wig. It’s a lot less of a permanent way to change your look, and I have about 10 – all different colors, shapes, bobs, long hair, short, feathered.

- Sara Blakely

The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.

- Peter Drucker

At first, Uniqlo was a casual chain on the back streets of Hiroshima. Then… we became a national brand in Japan. So, the next step is to become a global brand.

- Tadashi Yanai

Six out of 10 Americans believe the American dream is dead according to a recent poll.

- CBSNews.com

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

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas, but the image is that they all come from the top. I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

- Bill Gates

With tech companies, whoever’s the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, ‘Is this the end of them?’ And – there’s more – more times people think that’s the case than it really is the case.

- Bill Gates

Never consider the possibility of failure. As long as you persist, you will be successful.

- Brian Tracy

In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come.

- Peter Thiel

I am someone who tweets about what I have for breakfast, what I have for lunch, what I have for dinner, and for 99.99999 percent of the world, it’s useless. It’s meaningless. But for my mother, she loves it.

- Jack Dorsey

So, I think the output of our innovation is great. We have a culture of self-improvement. I know we can continue to improve. There is no issue. But at the same time, our absolute level of output is fantastic.

- Steve Ballmer

Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.

- Ben Horowitz

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.

- Winston Churchill

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