Notable Quotables

Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.

- Steve Martin

Even leaders with the best of intentions can have dumb ideas sometimes, and if you have good people around you, then hopefully they’ll stop you before you’ve done too much damage.

- David Novak

There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won’t stand for that.

- Steve Martin

Creating value is not enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create.

- Peter Thiel

Pessimism doesn’t grow your business or even maintain the status quo. The pessimists on your staff make the job harder for everyone around them. They make difficulties out of opportunities.

- Harvey Mackay

Only the Dark Lord of the Sith knows of our weakness. If informed the senate is, multiply our adversaries will.

- Yoda

Men sometimes stumble over the truth, but often pick themselves up and hurry off as though nothing had happened.

- Winston Churchill

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

- Elon Musk

My biggest crisis is that I don’t understand what young people like.

- Ma Huateng

People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

- Peter Drucker

I’m in two modes when I’m on Lanai: In engineering mode, I’m trying to find the right place for the reservoir and the desalination plant, and looking at designs for new hotel rooms. The rest of the time, I’m in decompression mode. I’m on Hulopoe Beach, going for a swim, or on my paddleboard surrounded by 100 spinner dolphins.

- Larry Ellison

Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. A good product manager is the CEO of the product. Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product.

- Ben Horowitz

For me, privacy and security are really important. We think about it in terms of both: You can’t have privacy without security.

- Larry Page

I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.

- Andrew Carnegie

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

- Larry Page

Money motivates neither the best people nor the best in people.

- Dee Hock

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 Cult of Done Bre Pettis wrote this manifesto on his blog: 1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. 2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. 3. There is no editing stage. 4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it. 5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it. 6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done. 7. Once you’re done you can throw it away. 8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done. 9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right. 10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes. 11. Destruction is a variant of done. 12. If you have an idea and publish it on the Internet, that counts as a ghost of done. 13. Done is the engine of more.

- Seth Godin

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

Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.

- Napoleon Hill

Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.

- P.T. Barnum

Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.

- Dale Carnegie

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

- Elon Musk

It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.

- Alisher Usmanov

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

- Thomas Edison

When I started the diamond business, no black person, period, was in it to do what we’re trying to do to change the industry. So I like to do things that I see clearly that are in my, you know, scope. And then, I had to figure how I get talented or smart business people around me to execute. That’s what I have to do.

- Russell Simmons

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

- Mark Twain

In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.

- Peter Thiel

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

- Henry Ford

Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.

- Seth Godin

Don’t let any opportunity lead you away from serving God. That’s a price that’s too high to pay.

- George Foreman

Entrepreneurial skills and ability for sheer hard work will help Hong Kong re-orient its economy for future growth through a broad variety of strong and promising businesses.

- Cheng Yu-tung

the only way to influence people is to talk in terms of what the other person wants.

- Dale Carnegie

I think George Will is somebody that said recently that the Republicans will not lose, as a Republican, that the Republicans will not win the election. I think it was a terrible statement.

- Donald Trump

I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

- Larry Page

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

- Bill Gates

We live in a culture that relishes tearing others down. It’s ultimately more fulfilling, though, to help people reach their goals. Instead of feeling jealous, remember: If God did it for them, He can do it for you.

- Joel Olsteen

A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.

- George Soros

God’s got you in the palm of His hand. You won’t leave one second before your time. If God wants you to be here, then you’re going to be here.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m less interested in how people are following each other and more interested in how they are following topics and tweets themselves. People are following more key words and concepts and more ideas and acting on those rather than individuals or organizations.

- Jack Dorsey

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I’d like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that’s not just e-mail with a view.

- Elon Musk

Do it, and then you will feel motivated to do it.

- Zig Ziglar

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.

- Winston Churchill

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

- Andrew Carnegie

As Americans we do not recognize the jurisdiction of the Hague Tribunal. We only follow court orders from the Chinese judiciary

- Sergey Brin

If you do not believe in your product or service enough to offer it to your own family and friends, then you should question the value of what you are selling.

- Zig Ziglar

We’ve got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.

- Bill Gates

A Prius is not a true hybrid, really. The current Prius is, like, 2 percent electric. It’s a gasoline car with slightly better mileage.

- Elon Musk

Bitcoin is mostly about anonymous transactions, and I don’t think over time that’s a good way to go. I’m a huge believe in digital currency… but doing it on an anonymous basis I think that leads to some abuses, so I’m not involved in Bitcoin.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft

- Bill Gates

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

The single reason for a salesperson’s existence is to get the Buyer’s commitment. Just how poor are salespeople at their jobs? In a study of professional sales people (those who sell full time), 50% failed to ask for the buyer’s commitment to buy.

- Jerry Vass

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

- Bill Gates

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

- Peter Drucker

Another challenge is a phenomenon that I call the Law of Crappy People. The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.

- Ben Horowitz

[In February 2011 on Square.] Starting a startup after twitter is so much easier than before.

- Jack Dorsey

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

- Oprah Winfrey

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

Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines, the one who actually talk to the customer, are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble within it, you must listen to what your associates are telling you.

- Sam Walton

Rockefeller preferred to own raw land. In 1873, he invested in seventy-nine scenic acres at Forest Hill, a lovely, thickly wooded spot, crisscrossed by steep ravines and gulleys, just four miles east of his Euclid Avenue home.

- Ron Chernow

Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.

- Elon Musk

The mistake that’s so easy to make is to get greedy as you choose your hive, to say, “this product is for everyone” or “anyone can benefit from this idea.” Well, there are seven billion people on the planet, so it’s unlikely your comment is correct; even if it is, there’s little chance that a virus would spread across a hive that big.

- Seth Godin

No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

- Napoleon Hill

Jobs and businesses are just vehicles to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

- Clay Clark

Go as far as you can see. When you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.

- Zig Ziglar

Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today. Go another mile!

- Og Mandino

I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

- Herbert Bayard Swope

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

- Winston Churchill

The Waffle Trainer later became the best-selling training shoe in the United States.

- Phil Knight

I’m truly passionate about basketball. I’m not as passionate about baseball as I am about basketball, but I watch baseball and I watch football. I love sports in general.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

- Walt Disney

If you don’t let people flourish in their jobs, why are they going to stay?

- Joel Olsteen

I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don’t just think, yes my country is doing well, but you think about the world at large.

- Bill Gates

Colleges are the equivalent of the subprime mortgage lenders who…

- Brian Tracy

The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.

- Peter Thiel

As Indian companies strive to be globally competitive, they have realized the importance of investing in information technology and networking to adapt quickly to rapidly shifting market transitions.

- John Chambers

You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.

- Andrew Carnegie

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

- Winston Churchill

Certainly I’ll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I’ve gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

- Bill Gates

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

- Thomas Edison

A good practice is to have the employee send you the agenda in advance. This will give her a chance to cancel the meeting if nothing is pressing.

- Ben Horowitz

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