I’ve always thought if we don’t want to enforce laws on the books, we should remove them from the books. But when you have laws, you breed contempt if you don’t enforce them.
- Michael Bloomberg
Notable Quotables
Don’t have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.
- Steve Martin
Just because an employee does things differently doesn’t mean he or she won’t do the job right or as well. If you establish expectations of the goal and the standards to follow, then methodology shouldn’t be an issue.
- Harvey Mackay
I will not lose, for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so it evens up for me.
- Jay-Z
Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night.
- Thomas Edison
The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit… a reputation, character.
- John D. Rockefeller
As the economy shifts, large (and small) organizations are discovering that this brainwashing thing was a huge error. You can’t snooze your way to greatness. You can’t optimize your way to surprising growth. You can’t organize your way into blamelessness.
- Seth Godin
Tell them to grab on to the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy. And that, obviously, would be happiness.
- Jack Welch
I enjoy the hunt much more than the ‘good life’ after the victory.
- Carl Icahn
I’m not losing any sleep over Dunkin Donuts.
- Howard Schultz
In 1973 when the Hong Kong stock market witnessed an unprecedented slump with the Hang Seng Index plunging by over 90% in a year, the Group built the New World Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong through the acquisition of Holt’s Wharf. In doing so we broke the dominance of the UK-based conglomerates and, as if [being given] a shot in the arm, initiated the course of weaving the companies with Chinese capital into the economic fabric of Hong Kong.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage.
- Howard Schultz
I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.
- Winston Churchill
We ride roughshod over the feelings of others, getting our own way, finding fault, issuing threats, criticising a child or an employee in front of others, without even considering the hurt to the other person’s pride. Whereas a few minutes’ thought, a considerate word or two, a genuine understanding of the other person’s attitude, would go so far toward alleviating the sting!
- Dale Carnegie
The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.
- Jerry Seinfeld
An optimist understands that life can be a bumpy road, but at least it is leading somewhere. They learn from mistakes and failures, and are not afraid to fail again.
- Harvey Mackay
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
- Albert Einstein
With the addition of these volumes, our Gulf Coast region is off to a good start for 2006 in its effort to grow its production. Combined, all regions are now showing growth in both production and reserves which is very attractive, especially considering the organic strategy on which we have predominately focused.
- Dan Dinges
We’ve grown from 18% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry to 23% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry over the last five years. Profits are up over 70%, where the industry profit is up about 35%. Pretty good.
- Steve Ballmer
Nature is truly wonderful. Only man is truly foul.
- Thomas Edison
Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest. Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends.
- Dale Carnegie
Certainly, none of us enjoy going through struggles, but you have to understand that your struggle may be an opportunity for advancement and promotion. The very thing you are fighting against so tenaciously may be the springboard that catapults you to a new level of excellence. Your challenges may become your greatest assets.
- Joel Olsteen
Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.
- Bill Gates
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
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
- Steve Jobs
confusion is the main cause of worry.
- Dale Carnegie
Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.
- Ben Horowitz
I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.
- Joel Olsteen
Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
- Marilyn vos Savant
You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it
- Peter Thiel
However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake: every individual has different talents and responsibilities as well as different opportunity costs, so equal amounts will seem arbitrary and unfair from the start. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Resentment at this stage can kill a company, but there’s no ownership formula to perfectly avoid it.
- Peter Thiel
I don’t think we’re going to run out of important things to do, compared with the resources that we have. There are many, many problems in the world that need solving.
- Larry Page
The number of units that were sold by the Group including those for which the Group acted as sales agent summed up to 2,960 residential units, amounting to approximately HK$9.2 billion in total sales proceeds.
- Lee Shau Kee
If you don’t have peace, it isn’t because someone took it from you; you gave it away. You cannot always control what happens to you, but you can control what happens in you.
- John C. Maxwell
We’re not going to outgrow our need for information.
- Seth Godin
I think if you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got to dream big and then dream bigger.
- Howard Schultz
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
- Jeff Bezos
As a group, we believe that education is extremely important for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. We spend heavily for the educations of our offspring.
- Thomas J Stanley
The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.
- Peter Thiel
Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike”, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
- Peter Thiel
Eventually you won’t think of ‘the Internet business.’ You’ll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn’t clear.
- Bill Gates
God didn’t make a mistake when He made you. You need to see yourself as God sees you.
- Joel Olsteen
People are more likely to accept an order if they have had a part in the decision that caused the order to be issued.
- Dale Carnegie
Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.
- Napoleon Hill
Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
- Peter Drucker
Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.
- Napoleon Hill
If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
- Elon Musk
Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present, good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
- Peter Thiel
It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.
- Bill Gates
This is an addictive pastime. You take no real risk, touch the world, and it responds. Repeat.
- Seth Godin
In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.
- Winston Churchill
They (the competition) need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Wal-Mart (DJC) on something like toothpaste (DJ Prices). That’s not what the customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out on the floor and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and ring that cash register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Wal-Mart tries to duplicate – and we try awfully hard – we can’t really do it.
- Sam Walton
I’ll trade glib for common sense any day.
- Stephen Wynn
Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.
- Peter Thiel
My natural inclination to be improv rather than an educated character serves me well.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.
- Warren G. Tracy
Future public education will require involvement and collaboration among various local, civic, private and nonprofit entities, a concept I like to refer to as ‘community entrepreneurship.’
- Donald Bren
I tell my employees that we’re in the service business, and it’s incidental that we fly airplanes.
- Herb Kelleher
Everything begins with a decision. Then, we have to manage that decision for the rest of your life.
- John C. Maxwell
But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.
- Sam Walton
You can build a successful career, regardless of your field of endeavor, by the dozens of little things you do on and off the job.
- Zig Ziglar
Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.
- Napoleon Hill
In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
- Ben Horowitz
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.
- Bill Gates
I am excited for the opportunity to pursue new interests, including my work with a few public company boards, several universities in the U.S. and the UK and ophthalmic charities whose goals are to improve eye health in emerging markets.
- David Pyott
We’ve always had a pretty competitive and pretty ferocious battle with British Airways… It’s lasted now about 14 years, and we’re very pleased to have survived it.
- Richard Branson
Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about.
- Winston Churchill
Creative leaders inherently know when rules need to be challenged, and they can see when a more flexible approach should be taken.
- John C. Maxwell
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
If you wake up deciding what you want to give versus what you’re going to get, you become a more successful person. In other words, if you want to make money, you have to help someone else make money.
- Russell Simmons
One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
- Ben Horowitz
The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.
- Phil Knight
The interview process takes twelve to fifteen hoursof your team’s time. This process is expensive for your team, so you should vet people in advance. A technique I use is to email the references and say, Rate this person one to ten. No one’s going to reply a five or a three by email; that means they hate the candidate. Call me is usually the response for a sub-seven rating. At the same time, nobody is going to reply with a ten. What you’re really looking for is a bunch of eights and nines. This is an exceptionally quick referencing system when you’re trying to triage a list.
- Reid Hoffman
We all know now that the 747 became the flagship jumbo jet of the airline industry, but the decision looks much different from the perspective of the late 1960s. Yet—and this is the key point—Boeing was willing to make the bold move in the face of the risks. As in Boeing’s case, the risks do not always come without pain.
- James C. Collins
This Sunday School has been of help to me, greater perhaps than any other force in my Christian life, and I can ask no better things for you than that you, and all that shall come after you in this great band of workers for Christ, shall receive the same measure of blessedness which I have been permitted to have.
- John D. Rockefeller
Love to learn—hate to be taught.
- Winston Churchill
There’s a time that may come in an organization where leading by influence is not enough. When things are not going the way they need to go, there’s a time when one has to step up… to set the organization back on the right direction.
- Abigail Johnson
I believe that uncertainty is really my spirit’s way of whispering, I’m in flux. I can’t decide for you. Something is off-balance here.
- Oprah Winfrey
Be a peg, hammered into the frozen ground, immovable.
- Winston Churchill
Saying yes makes you fail to meet expectations of theobligation.
- David Nilssen
Intentional Dishonesty.
- Napoleon Hill
1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality.2. A bad plan is better than no plan.3. Competitive markets destroy profits.4. Sales matters just as much as product.
- Peter Thiel
Mr. Carnegie’s Master Mind group consisted of a staff of approximately 50 men, with whom he surrounded himself, for the definiteness purpose of manufacturing and marketing steel. He attributed his entire fortune to the POWER he accumulated through this Master Mind…Great POWER CAN BE ACCUMULATED THROUGH NO OTHER PRINCIPLE.
- Napoleon Hill
Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.
- Winston Churchill
A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.
- Peter Thiel
If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?
- John Wooden
In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where he wants to go, and gets up and goes.
- John Erskine
Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.
- Michael Gerber
Nobody wanted to believe Jack Ma.
- Jack Ma
Now when I consider investing in a startup, I study the founding teams. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much. Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together—otherwise they’re just rolling dice.
- Peter Thiel
This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors.
- Winston Churchill
We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.
- Walt Disney
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
- Mark Twain
Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.
- W. Clement Stone
One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water.
- Larry Ellison
Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.
- Winston Churchill
Worrying about the past or the future isn’t productive. When you start chastising yourself for past mistakes, or seeing disaster around every corner, stop and take a breath and ask yourself what you can do right now to succeed.
- Harvey Mackay
But use the opposite technique – be liberal with your encouragement, make the thing seem easy to do, let the other person know that you have faith in his ability to do it, that he has an undeveloped flair for it – and he will practise until the dawn comes in the window in order to excel.
- Dale Carnegie
What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.
- Elon Musk
