We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.
- Henry Ford
Notable Quotables
Make today worth remembering.
- Zig Ziglar
Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).
- Peter Thiel
In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.
- Bill Gates
It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides.
- Winston Churchill
Levi Strauss headed for the gold fields of California to strike it rich in mining. However, he was not a good miner, so he instead began sewing pants out of canvas for the miners who were successful. Today I think most of the world has heard of Levi’s pants.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Through the wisdom of its government leaders and the entrepreneurship of its private sector, India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy, … Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.
- John Chambers
Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires.
- Seth Godin
Anything you’re interested in the world – whether it be Charlie Rose or JetBlue or a public figure or your local coffee shop – they’re on Twitter and broadcasting what is interesting to them.
- Jack Dorsey
God has amazing things in your future.
- Joel Olsteen
The steel business is a local business. We do believe in the U.S. economy and would like to have a strong, balanced presence here.
- Alexei Mordashov
Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.
- Timothy Ferriss
What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.
- Donald Trump
You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.
- Sam Rayburn
Andy Andrews is the best speaker I have ever seen.
- Zig Ziglar
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
- Confucius
Your job is not to judge. Your job is not to figure out if someone deserves something. Your job is to lift the fallen, to restore the broken, and to heal the hurting.
- Joel Olsteen
People are fond of using the its not what you know, its who you know adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense.
- Timothy Ferriss
It’s Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.
- Larry Ellison
Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.
- Bill Gates
Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.
- Yoda
Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.
- Dale Carnegie
In the early days, anybody with a glue pot and a pair of scissors could get into the shoe business…
- Phil Knight
[In 1998] The Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse.
- Phil Knight
Africa is on the rise.
- Bill Gates
Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.
- Peter Drucker
I forgive all personal weaknesses except egomania and pretension.
- Herb Kelleher
There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it.
- Peter Drucker
My politics are: I’m a trustbuster. Very focused. And yeah, I’m pro-efficiency. I want the most economic activity at the lowest price possible. It’s good for everybody; it’s not red or blue.
- Travis Kalanick
Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
We’ve been able to go deep rather than broad.
- Jack Dorsey
Competitiveness is really what it costs you per man-hour to get you what you want. In other words, there’s an education level that plays into the mix and so if it’s inexpensive to buy an hour of real good education in places like China versus the U.S., that factors in.
- Ray Dalio
Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
- Yoda
Visionary companies are so clear about what they stand for and what they’re trying to achieve that they simply don’t have room for those unwilling or unable to fit their exacting standards.
- James C. Collins
You’ll never achieve real success unless you like what you’re doing.
- Dale Carnegie
The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.
- Bill Gates
There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.
- Warren Buffett
Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that’s what I think keeps me hungry.
- Warren Buffett
Lightening is something which, again, we would rather avoid.
- Richard Branson
A lot of stuff I do out of pure obsessiveness.
- Jerry Seinfeld
What I most identify with is effortless fashion, looking as if someone’s not put a lot of effort into their look.
- Sara Blakely
Wal-Mart is an amazing success story. What I particularly admire very much about the late Sam Walton was his policy of valuing his employees. Giving value to employees is very rare in the retail industry. I also admire the strategies Walton used to build up his discount store concept.
- Tadashi Yanai
Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.
- Elon Musk
I’ve done a number of Super Bowl ads. And that is the best advertising of the year. That is when people realize they’re going to be compared directly against other ads.
- Jerry Seinfeld
One incident preserved by General Ismay in an apocryphal and somewhat lively form may be allowed to lighten the narrative. His orderly, a Royal Marine, was shown the sights of Moscow by one of the Intourist guides. “This,” said the Russian, “is the Eden Hotel, formerly Ribbentrop Hotel. Here is Churchill Street, formerly Hitler Street. Here is the Beaverbrook railway station, formerly Goering railway station. Will you have a cigarette, comrade?” The Marine replied, “Thank you, comrade, formerly bastard!” This tale, though jocular, illustrates none the less the strange atmosphere of these meetings.
- Winston Churchill
I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.
- Elon Musk
Stock market bubbles don’t grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but reality as distorted by a misconception.
- George Soros
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anais Nin
We got so much better so quickly it was hard to believe. We totally stood Kmart off in those small towns of ours. Almost from the beginning, they weren’t very successful at taking our customers away in Jeff City and Poplar Bluff. Once Kmart arrived, we worked even harder at pleasing our customers, and they stayed loyal. This gave us a great surge of confidence in ourselves. But at that time our sales were 5 percent of Kmart’s. (through competition) Wal-Mart has lowered the gross margin in retailing from around 35 percent in the early 60s to only 22 percent today.
- Sam Walton
Any business today that embraces the status quo as an operating principle is going to be on a death march.
- Howard Schultz
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
My little girls are the most beautiful women in the world. I am a lucky, lucky man. I will spend every day making sure that they know this.
- Russell Simmons
The Habit of Indiscriminate Spending.
- Napoleon Hill
Leaders don’t rise to the pinnacle of success without developing the right set of attitudes and habits, they make every day a masterpiece.
- John C. Maxwell
God can cause opportunity to find you. He has unexpected blessings where you suddenly meet the right person, or suddenly your health improves, or suddenly you’re able to pay off your house. That’s God shifting things in your favor.
- Joel Olsteen
If you believe as I do that you were born to win, you’re going to have to find your fears and start facing them.
- Zig Ziglar
I’ve got the greatest job in the world. There’s no other job in government where cause and effect is so tightly coupled where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways and in so many different people’s lives. It’s a great challenge.
- Michael Bloomberg
You have enough people against you… be for yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.
- Peter Drucker
God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.
- Joel Olsteen
The ultimate connection is when you are connected to the creator of the universe.
- Joel Olsteen
I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m telling you, you can’t compare Saudi Arabia to other countries.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
I hope you will take good care of your health, this is religious duty, and you can accomplish so much for the world if you keep well and strong.
- John D. Rockefeller
Southwest Airlines have been such a people-first model for me for so long that it was inspiring just to be physically in a place I already knew so much about. Yet I didn’t fully understand just how far they are willing to go to get the right people in the right seats until well after our best practices tour when someone I know applied for an entry level position with the company.
- David Novak
I DECLARE that God has a great plan for my life. He is directing my steps. And even though I may not always understand how, I know my situation is not a surprise to God. He will work out every detail to my advantage. In His perfect timing, everything will turn out right. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Today’s stock price is X, tommorrow’s is up to you.
- Sam Walton
A true entrepreneur is someone who seeks to profitably solve a problem that the world has in exchange for enough monetary compensation to achieve their dreams.
- Clay Clark
Do it now! can affect every phase of your life. It can help you do the things you should do but don’t feel like doing. It can keep you from procrastinating when an unpleasant duty faces you. But it can also help you do those things that you want to do. It helps you seize those precious moments that, if lost, may never be retrieved.
- Napoleon Hill
Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.
- Peter Thiel
Friends are made my many acts and lost by only one.
- Harvey Mackay
Keep the big picture in mind. There are always opportunities and possibilities, and thinking too small can negate a lot of them.
- Donald Trump
The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
- Dale Carnegie
The factory has programmed that adventurous impulse out of us. The economic imperative of the last century has been to avoid risk, avoid change, and most of all, avoid exploration and the new. An efficient factory fears change because change means retooling and risk and a blip in productivity. Sure, we’ll put up with change if we have to, and welcome the predictable incremental change of productivity improvement, but please leave us alone when it comes to the word “bold.” Avoiding risk worked then but doesn’t work now. Now “what’s next?” is in fact the driving force for individuals and for organizations. Ever onward, ever faster.
- Seth Godin
Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?
- Marshall Bruce Mathers III
The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.
- Winston Churchill
Great companies that build an enduring brand have an emotional relationship with customers that has no barrier. And that emotional relationship is on the most important characteristic, which is trust.
- Howard Schultz
You were not created to just get by with an average, unrewarding, or unfulfilling life. God created you to leave your mark on this generation.
- Joel Olsteen
People buy titles, and not contents of books. By merely changing the name of one book that was not moving his sales on that book jumped upward more a million copies. The inside of the book was no changed in any way. He merely ripped off the cover bearing the title that did not sell, and put on new cover with a title that had box-office value.
- Napoleon Hill
Fear itself is quite fear-inducing. Most intelligent people in the world dress it up as something else: optimistic denial.
- Timothy Ferriss
The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more things you’ll have to express gratitude for.
- Zig Ziglar
You must unlearn what you have learned.
- Yoda
Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.
- John C. Maxwell
You don’t have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.
- Michael Dell
Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.
- Bill Gates
There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. It’s not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well.
- George Soros
If a man’s heart is rankling with discord and ill feeling toward you, you can’t win him to your way of thinking with all the logic in Christendom. Scolding parents and domineering bosses and husbands and nagging wives ought to realize that people don’t want to change their minds. They can’t be forced or driven to agree with you or me. But they may possibly be led to, if we are gentle and friendly, ever so gentle and ever so friendly.
- Dale Carnegie
I was hooked and I would make reward and recognition one of my primary focuses as a leader
- David Novak
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.
- Dale Carnegie
Uber is efficiency with elegance on top. That’s why I buy an iPhone instead of an average cell phone, why I go to a nice restaurant and pay a little bit more. It’s for the experience.
- Travis Kalanick
We are gods in the chrysalis.
- Dale Carnegie
Keep in mind, just because you don’t know the answer doesn’t mean that one does not exist. You simply haven’t discovered it yet.
- Joel Olsteen
I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.
- Bill Gates
It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you.
- Ben Horowitz
Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.
- Ray Kroc
I said one time that it shouldn’t matter who counts to 30 for filling up retail prescriptions, and I caught a lot of grief for that, and probably rightfully so. But that wasn’t the point. The point is that putting pills in a bottle doesn’t change health outcomes. It doesn’t matter whether you get your pills at Walgreen or CVS or Kroger. The reality is: What happens with that process? Who is taking care of that patient? It’s not counting pills and sticking them in bottles. That doesn’t add any value.
- George Paz
You didn’t grow up driving…you figured it out.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.
- Jeff Bezos
What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues. Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.
- John Chambers
