Notable Quotables

Productivity is grounded in the PC. Where does the computing power come from? How would you run ‘USA Today’ without PCs? Run a hospital without PCs? People don’t want products, they want solutions.

- Michael Dell

It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?

- Peter Thiel

India has over 20 percent of the kids born in the world. And they move around a lot.

- Bill Gates

Starting means you’re going to finish. If it doesn’t ship, you’ve failed. You haven’t poked the box if the box doesn’t realize it’s been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it’s merely a hobby.

- Seth Godin

I think part of the reason we’re successful so far is that originally we didn’t really want to start a business.

- Larry Page

With an export-driven economy, Hong Kong is unavoidably affected by any hiccup in the outside world.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

- Mark Zuckerberg

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

- Winston Churchill

The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.

- Napoleon Hill

Much of our strategic shift is providing production advances over the next 60 days in the Gulf Coast. This effort sets the stage for Gulf Coast growth in 2006, along with production growth in our East, West and Canada regions.

- Dan Dinges

TweetDeck is a very interesting client, because it presents a view that no other client in the world presents, which is this multicolumn, massive amounts of information in one pane. And people really, really enjoy that.

- Jack Dorsey

Here’s a statistician joke for your next hot date: Person A: What happens when Bill Gates walks into a bar of 55 people? Person B: I don’t know. What? Person A: The average net worth jumps to more than a billion dollars!

- Timothy Ferriss

Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be. As is your faith in the dark side of the Force.

- Yoda

Inflation is taking up the poverty line, and poverty is not just economic but defined by way of health and education.

- Azim Premji

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

- Andrew Carnegie

CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.

- Peter Thiel

The response to the Starbucks brand has been phenomenal in our international markets.

- Howard Schultz

After all God doesn’t want you to be an imitation of someone else. You should be the original you were created to be. There is an anointing on your life, an empowerment. Not to be somebody else, but to be you. If you let people squeeze you into their molds and you bow down to their pressure to try to please your critics, it not only takes away your uniqueness, but it also lessens the favor on your life.

- Joel Olsteen

Drucker said: ‘If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?’ … Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.

- Jack Welch

The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense.

- John C. Maxwell

When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.

- Bill Gates

Everybody has a calling. And your real job in life is to figure out as soon as possible what that is, who you were meant to be, and to begin to honor that in the best way possible for yourself.

- Oprah Winfrey

Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.

- Napoleon Hill

Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.

- Napoleon Hill

If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

- Larry Page

Customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.

- Peter Thiel

There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize any-one. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.

- Dale Carnegie

How to walk to Cleveland Shipping is an event. There’s life before you ship and then there’s the moment you ship. And then there’s life after you ship. Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you’re closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you’re still heading toward Cleveland. Keep starting until you finish.

- Seth Godin

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.

- Walt Disney

Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, ‘I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.’ That is why dogs make such a hit. They are so glad to see us that they almost jump out of their skins. So, naturally, we are glad to see them.

- Dale Carnegie

We don’t know exactly how it will work. Advertisers want greater access, better accountability.

- Sergey Brin

The worst way of flying, I think, is standby. It never works. That’s why they call it standby. You end up standing there going, ‘Bye!’

- Jerry Seinfeld

Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember Life is too short to be little.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.

- Ray Dalio

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical.

- Joel Olsteen

Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.

- Bill Gates

When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world. Now I am.

- Elon Musk

When times are bad is when you want to build! Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost more?

- Ray Kroc

Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.

- Warren Buffett

We are fastidious investors. On average, we investnearly 20 percent of our household realized income each year. Most of us invest at least 15 percent. Seventy-nine percent of us have at least one account with a brokerage company. But we make our own investment decisions.

- Thomas J Stanley

Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it’s really let us down.

- Bill Gates

Anyone working for a big company might be skeptical that a large business, or even a strictly online business, can form the same kind of friendly, loyal relationship with customers as a local retailer. I’m saying it’s already been done because I lived it.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

When you marry operating excellence with innovation, you multiply the value of your creativity.

- James C. Collins

For me, it’s a purity thing about the joke itself. It’s a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that’s a legitimate item you have there. For me, it’s nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It’s just not what I’m in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We will intensify our efforts to build out our infrastructure overseas and to develop products that are tailored to individual markets

- Sergey Brin

Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a byproduct – a byproduct of achievement.

- Ray Kroc

TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE, THE PRODUCTS, AND THE PROFITS—IN THAT ORDER.

- Ben Horowitz

The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.

- Napoleon Hill

That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night1

- James C. Collins

Don’t go in and tell somebody else how to run their business.

- Carl Icahn

Let’s think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it’s okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea… well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you’re not gonna get people coming up with ideas.”

- Elon Musk

Once the habit is ingrained and you become the starter, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to notice, to instigate, and to initiate. Momentum builds and you get better at generating it. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to initiate things all day the next day, you’ll wake up with a list. And as you create a culture of people who are always seeking to connect and improve and poke, the bar gets raised. What might be considered a board-level decision at one of your competitors’ companies gets done as a matter of course. What might be reserved for a manager’s intervention gets handled at the customer level, saving you time and money (and generating customer joy). This incredibly prosaic idea, the very simple act of initiating, is actually profoundly transformative. Forward motion is a defensible business asset.

- Seth Godin

No genuine leader is ever too busy to do anything which may be required of him in his capacity as leader. When a man, whether he is a leader of followers, admits he is too busy to change his plans, or to give attention to any emergency, he admits his inefficiency. The successful leader must be the master of all details connected with his position.

- Napoleon Hill

Properly run startups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Too often the investment in people stops there.

- Ben Horowitz

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.

- Dave Barry

Not victory , Obi- Wan. The shroud of the Dark Side has fallen. Begun, this Clone War has.

- Yoda

Everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it? Even if you don’t consciously agree with that statement, your brain sure does.

- Seth Godin

When commercializing disruptive technologies, they found or developed new markets that valued the attributes of the disruptive products, rather than search for a technological breakthrough so that the disruptive product could compete as a sustaining technology in mainstream markets.

- Clayton M. Christensen

You should give 80% of your time and attention to your best 20% of employees. If you have one hundred customers, the top twenty will provide you with 80% of your business.

- John Maxwell

When we don’t forgive, we’re not hurting the other person. We’re not hurting the company that did us wrong. We’re not hurting God. We’re only hurting ourselves.

- Joel Olsteen

While there’s always room for improvement, … we were very pleased with our results in what is a seasonally-challenging quarter.

- John Chambers

You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.

- John C. Maxwell

I worked with many departments in China to organise a ‘One million farmer’ programme. The scheme trained them to learn professional skills.

- Lee Shau Kee

When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.

- John C. Maxwell

Entrepreneurs must think in specifics with laser-like precision.

- Jack Nadel

You must develop a verification system for anything in your business that you expect to happen.

- Clay Clark

The secret to being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.

- Seth Godin

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool.

- Bill Gates

Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.

- Peter Thiel

Delay taking a salary until your business is generating cash flow from sales…by delaying taking a salary, you can reinvest sales to help grow your business.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Over the years, Hong Kong has been confronted with various challenges. On every occasion, we were able to rely on our unique qualities – resourcefulness, perseverance, diligence and passion for excellence – to rise above our difficulties.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I would call lack of candor the biggest dirty little secret in business, basically blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.

- Jack Welch

An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

- Jack Welch

My role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.

- Sam Walton

Most good ideas are already out there, and to learn about them, all you have to do is ask the right people.

- David Novak

Even freebies must be delivered with a certain salesmanship or the receiver does not perceived the true value of the gift.

- Jerry Vass

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

It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs. During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.

- Ben Horowitz

In the 1960s, if you were a blue collar worker or uneducated, and you had an injury on the job, the company basically dismissed you.

- Howard Schultz

When you deal with change, you have a couple choices: you can lead it and make the rules, or you can be a fast follower, or you can be a slow follower.

- Charles Ergen

And if I were the president, I’d go out there and I’d emphasize the things I have done, and I’d say, ‘Some things haven’t worked, and I’m sorry about that, but I keep trying.’ And I’m – and I think the president is a very viable candidate, and you’re going to have a real horse race here no matter who the Republican nominee is.

- Michael Bloomberg

AP pleaded guilty to criminal theft of our software. Let me be clear. I’m not accusing SAP of anything. What did SAP do? Did you engage in criminal behavior and steal lots of Oracle software? Yes. That’s SAP. Who was CEO when you were doing all this criminal stuff? Leo.

- Larry Ellison

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription