Notable Quotables

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

- Herbert Simon

The first three-and-a-half months of calendar year 2001 have been extremely challenging for many of us in high-tech.

- John Chambers

I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.

- Oprah Winfrey

The value we create is directly related to how much valuable information we can produce, how much trust we can earn, and how often we innovate.

- Seth Godin

Learn to say No to the good so that you can say Yes to your best.

- John Maxwell

If you run a corporation, your job is to maximize the return on investment for your investors. Good for you. But by the same token, we have to remember that corporations have no compassion. That’s why legislation and regulations are necessary.

- Russell Simmons

To succeed in business, you must build a brand and never destroy it.

- Aliko Dangote

Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.

- Peter Thiel

I run a bunch of charities and I say this line to people: ‘I am somebody who has always been helped.’ A little thing like that can make people believe it.

- Russell Simmons

If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.

- Peter Thiel

The man who wavers in his decisions, shows that he is not sure of himself. He cannot lead others successfully.

- Napoleon Hill

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

- Henry Ford

“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

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent….

- Thomas Edison

The worse a situation becomes the less it takes to turn it around, the bigger the upside.

- George Soros

It’s easier to explain price once than to apologize for quality forever.

- Zig Ziglar

I’m a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That’s what I’ve done in my career, one that’s culminated in – at least to this point – playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That’s the Bakken field, which I believe will yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come, maybe more.

- Harold Hamm

The patterns of success and failure we see among firms faced with sustaining and disruptive technology change are a natural or systematic result of good managerial decisions. That is, in fact, why disruptive technologies confront innovators with such a dilemma. Working harder, being smarter, investing more aggressively, and listening more astutely to customers are all solutions to the problems posed by new sustaining technologies. But these paradigms of sound management are useless—even counterproductive, in many instances—when dealing with disruptive technology.

- Clayton M. Christensen

There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone. I wish Apple would use them and could use them, and I don’t know if Samsung would stop us.

- Steve Wozniak

Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that’s something I’m accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn’t bother me.

- Timothy Ferriss

Just as ships are built to sail the seas and planes to fly the heavens, so is man created for a purpose.

- Zig Ziglar

Your people give their days (and sometimes their nights) to you. They give their hands, brains, and hearts. Sure, the company pays them. It fills their wallets. But as a leader, you need to fill their souls. You can do that by getting in their skin, by giving the work meaning, by clearing obstacles, and by demonstrating the generosity gene. And you can do it, perhaps most powerfully, by creating an environment that’s exciting and enjoyable.

- Jack Welch

The choice is between two ways of life: between individual liberty and State domination, between concentration of ownership in the hands of the State and the extension of ownership over the widest number of individuals, between the dead hand of monopoly and the stimulus of competition, between a policy of increasing restraint and a policy of liberating energy and ingenuity, between a policy of levelling down and a policy of opportunity for all to rise upwards from a basic standard.

- Winston Churchill

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

- Ben Horowitz

You may have made a lot of wrong choices, but you’ve also made a lot of choices that were right. Focus on your good qualities. Focus on your victories. Get off the treadmill of guilt.

- Joel Olsteen

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities – but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.

- Winston Churchill

It’s a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

- Steve Martin

Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs results from 20% of the inputs.

- Timothy Ferriss

Are you committed to a life of continual counseling, growth, and education? Are you committed to a life of consistently receiving truth, of renewing your mind? From what sources do you receive your counseling? Are you reading books by authors who speak wisdom? Are you listening to music and watching movies that have redemptive and edifying themes? Are you involved in a small group or community of people that can offer you support, guidance, and encouragement, and in which you give back that which you have been given? Do you know of professional counselors you can see when needed? Are you asking God for wisdom about life on a regular basis? (He says if you will ask, He will provide [see James 1:5–8].)

- Zig Ziglar

The responsibility of the leader is to define reality and create hope.

- David Novak

The Group has always adhered to prudent financial management principles.

- Lee Shau Kee

The [Henderson] Group continuously strives to upgrade the quality of its development properties by applying new technologies and building materials to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of construction.

- Lee Shau Kee

I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course, it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up as dictators. What I now ask of you is military success and I will risk the dictatorship.

- Dale Carnegie

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.

- Bill Gates

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

- Bill Gates

It’s obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.

- Elon Musk

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

- James C. Collins

The failure to strangle Bolshevism at its birth and to bring Russia, then prostrate, by one means or another, into the general democratic system lies heavy upon us today.

- Winston Churchill

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

- Zig Ziglar

When someone expresses some feeling, attitude or belief, our tendency is almost immediately to feel that’s right,” or that’s stupid,” that’s abnormal,” that’s unreasonable,” that’s incorrect,” that’s not nice.” Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of the statement is to the other person.

- Dale Carnegie

don’t talk about the way you are. Talk about the way you want to be.

- Joel Olsteen

Differentiation (rating and evaluating people) Develops Great Organizations. Differentiation is hard, anybody who finds it easy doesn’t belong in the organization, and anyone who can’t do it falls in the same category…It is important for companies to continually remove the bottom 10 percent of their employees anually.

- Jack Welch

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

- Napoleon Hill

You can’t grow long-term if you can’t eat short-term. Anybody can manage short. Anybody can manage long. Balancing those two things is what management is.

- Jack Welch

It’s God’s will for you to live in prosperity instead of poverty. It’s God’s will for you to pay your bills and not be in debt.

- Joel Olsteen

Take one cup of love, two cups of loyalty, three cups of forgiveness, four quarts of faith and one barrel of laughter. Take love and loyalty and mix them thoroughly with faith; blend with tenderness, kindness and understanding. Add friendship and hope. Sprinkle abundantly with laughter. Bake it with sunshine. Wrap it regularly with lots of hugs. Serve generous helpings daily.

- Zig Ziglar

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don’t count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

- Mukesh Ambani

The U.S. has done a great job improving productivity. We’re making a lot more steel in Dearborn with fewer people. The unions have accepted much better work rules.

- Alexei Mordashov

Anger is a waste of energy. Steam which is used to blow off a safety valve would be better used to drive an engine.

- Winston Churchill

DAY TWENTY I DECLARE that I am calm and peaceful. I will not let people or circumstances upset me. I will rise above every difficulty, knowing that God has given me the power to remain calm. I choose to live my life happy, bloom where I am planted, and let God fight my battles. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

It’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s how you respond to what happens to you that makes a difference.

- Zig Ziglar

Leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.

- Ben Horowitz

Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First he gets up everyday bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever know. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction. (qualities of great leaders)

- David Glass

I really believed that I said then, and I still do. But we figured out a way to grow, and stay profitable, and there was no logical place to stop. The way I approached managing the business, I always tried to maintain a sense of hands-on, personal supervision – usually flying around to take a look at our stores on a regular basis. But from the very beginning, even on my paper routes in college, I have also been a delegator, trying to hire the best possible people to manage the stores. That’s been the case since back in Newport….We’re big now. We’re really big. That’s not something I like to focus on. I always wanted to be the best retailer in the world, not necessarily the biggest…(being big poses opportunities), but being big also poses big dangers. It has ruined many a fine company – including some giant retailers – who started out strong and got bloated or out of touch or were slow to react to the needs of their customers. Here’s the point: the biggest Wal-Mart gets, the more essential it is that we think small. Because that is exactly how we have become a big corporation.

- Sam Walton

Insulation prevents you from making the change and finding the understanding you set out to achieve in the first place.

- Seth Godin

Interestingly, self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires. Also, three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs.

- The Millionaire Next Door

For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Let go of yesterday. Let today be a new beginning and be the best that you can, and you’ll get to where God wants you to be.

- Joel Olsteen

My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.

- Seth Godin

Desire is what takes the hot water of mediocrity and turns it into the steam of outstanding success.

- Zig Ziglar

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

The lifeblood of job creation in America is small business, but they can’t get access to credit.

- Howard Schultz

The safest plan, and the one most sure of success for the young man starting in life, is to select the vocation which is most congenial to his tastes.

- P.T. Barnum

I think there’s a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.

- Ben Horowitz

Sales were limited by how many shoes we had, shoes were limited by how many dollars we had to order them.

- Phil Knight

The strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you.

- Peter Thiel

You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.

- Ben Horowitz

Don’t fight change; embrace it, and you will step into the fullness of what God has in store.

- Joel Olsteen

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

- John C. Maxwell

I’m skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education…. People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it’s very unclear how viable they are in many cases.

- Peter Thiel

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

When I look at the 10% of Americans who control 90% of all the shares in America and 73% of the wealth, I understand exactly where their wealth was derived. Many acquired that wealth in much the same way as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison (who was worth far more than Bill Gates at his day and age). The list includes Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Warren Buffet, Rupert Murdock, Anita Roddick, Richard Branson, and others who all acquired their wealth the same way. They found their spirit and their mission; built a business; and allowed others to share in the dreams, the risks as well as the rewards. You can do the same thing if you want. Just follow the same diagram rich dad guided me with: the B-I Triangle.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.

- Atul Gawande

We often hear military experts inculcate the doctrine of giving priority to the decisive theatre. There is a lot in this. But in war this principle, like all others, is governed by facts and circumstances; otherwise strategy would be too easy. It would become a drill-book and not an art; it would depend upon rules and not on an instructed and fortunate judgment of the proportions of an ever-changing scene.

- Winston Churchill

If you pay that price daily by planning and preparing and working to become the right kind of person, then you can legitimately expect to have all that life has to offer.

- Zig Ziglar

The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn’t have that kind of personality, and it’s a terrifying thing to say.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You are what you are and you are where you are because of what has gone into your mind. You change what you are and you change where you are by changing what goes into your mind.

- Zig Ziglar

KNOWLEDGE will not attract money, unless it is organized, and intelligently directed, through practical PLANS OF ACTION, to the DEFINITE END of ac- cumulation of money. Lack of understanding of this fact has been the source of confusion to millions of people who falsely believe that knowledge is power. It is nothing of the sort! Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end.

- Napoleon Hill

of preparing for defeat, prepare for victory. Prepare for increase. Prepare for God’s favor. You have to set the tone at the start of each day.

- Joel Olsteen

Personally, I think the failure to really kind of get his arms around this company and this industry led to confusion on behalf of the management team. And I didn’t see that getting any better.

- Phil Knight

There are two ways to grow: by stealing from the competition or by growing the market. The first path is slow and painful and difficult. The second path is where the magic of fast growth kicks in.

- Seth Godin

I love doing a lot of things I’m told I can’t do. I think that’s what drives me and keeps me awake every day.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

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

Always try to learn from other peoples mistakes, not your own – It is much cheaper that way!

- Donald Trump

Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

- Winston Churchill

When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.

- Larry Ellison

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