Notable Quotables

It’s true that I run a multi-national group but I have no interests in India. So please tell me, what should my identity be?

- Lakshmi Mittal

It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.

- Seth Godin

Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.

- Steve Wozniak

If they really don’t want to buy the flats, I’ll take their deposits.

- Lee Shau Kee

Paper money will suffer. I’d be in mortar, not paper (money). We are in a time when paper investments are riskier than in the past. There is also a great amount of sovereign risk.

- Lee Shau Kee

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

- Jerry Seinfeld

But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you’re confident that you’ll catch a bird flying by. It’s an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn’t come by, but a few times it does.

- Reed Hastings

If you are against yourself, you will never reach your highest potential. And when you criticize yourself, you’re criticizing God.

- Joel Olsteen

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

- Seth Godin

The secret of your success is found in your daily routine

- John Maxwell

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

- Reed Hastings

If you’re not seeing God move in your life right now, one of two possibilities must be considered. Either your requests are not God’s best and will probably not be answered the way you’d like or it must not be the right time. If God were to answer that prayer the way you are hoping, it could interfere with his ideal plan for you.

- Joel Olsteen

Nigeria has moved into low-middle-income, but their north is very poor, and the health care systems there have broken down.

- Bill Gates

CNN is pretty consistently on the left, if you look at their choice of stories, what they play up. It’s not what they say. It’s what they highlight.

- Rupert Murdoch

If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that’s a good discussion. Maybe that’s the way to help close the deficit.

- Bill Gates

During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

- Ben Horowitz

Haiti should remind us all that there is an immediate need to invest in and promote long-term development projects that are sustainable, scalable, and proven to work.

- Bill Gates

God knows your value; He sees your potential. You may not understand everything you are going through right now. But hold your head up high, knowing that God is in control and he has a great plan and purpose for your life. Your dreams may not have turned out exactly as you’d hoped, but the bible says that God’s ways are better and higher than our ways, even when everybody else rejects you, remember, God stands before you with His arms open wide. He always accepts you. He always confirms your value. God sees your two good moves! You are His prized possession. No matter what you go through in life, no matter how many disappointments you suffer, your value in God’s eyes always remains the same. You will always be the apple of His eye. He will never give up on you, so don’t give up on yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

- Steve Wozniak

When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?

- Jack Welch

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

[On the Swoosh] It was 1971 and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million. So I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State

- Phil Knight

My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids.

- Joel Olsteen

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.

- Bill Gates

It is possible to know all there is to know about a subject—medicine, for example—but if you don’t have M.D. at the end of your name, few will listen. The M.D. is what I term a credibility indicator.” The so-called expert with the most credibility indicators, whether acronyms or affiliations, is often the most successful in the marketplace, even if other candidates have more in-depth knowledge. This is a matter of superior positioning, not deception.

- Timothy Ferriss

If I were to retire, I would keep my family’s interest in the company the same and say, Don’t sell.

- Sheldon Adelson

We are focusing on the increasing need for mobility and growing demand from our industrial customers. The production volume for vehicles weighing up to six tons is expected to rise to between 100 million and 105 million vehicles. Furthermore, installation of electronics and software will continue to grow substantially, driven by growing demands from end-users and increasingly strict legal requirements for safety and energy consumption. It is partly on this basis that we are aiming for profitable sales of over €50 billion in 2020.

- Elmar Degenhart

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

- Winston Churchill

Trees will improve property values, take pollutants out of the air, help with water runoff.

- Michael Bloomberg

My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.

- Steve Wozniak

That’s the goal, isn’t it? For every crack to be filled with your ideas and innovations and creativity? The only way to achieve this, though, is to be prepared for many of them to fail, to land on pavement, to be perfect yet cease to grow. We can cry about these failures, but that will lead us to hold back on the next idea. Or we can celebrate them, realizing that it’s proof that we’re being promiscuous in our shipping, putting the best work we can into the world, regardless of whether this particular idea actually works. When was the last time you set out to be promiscuous in your failures?

- Seth Godin

It is hard to realize today that “government” during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln’s Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not “executives” and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.

- Peter Drucker

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

- Mark Zuckerberg

We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it.

- James C. Collins

At the very beginning I actually felt a bit nervous. I didn’t have much experience in gaming.

- Lui Che Woo

I was trying to convince all these men to try to make a product that they didn’t even wear! Or if they did wear them, they were not admitting it! There was the problem right there. No wonder their hosiery was so uncomfortable.

- Sara Blakely

Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe.

- Joel Olsteen

Hope is the power that gives a person the confidence to step out and try.

- Zig Ziglar

People were expecting Rouge to go bankrupt, so there was a lot of anxiety. The corporate culture problem was even worse than in Russia. And at the same time, the work rules were more difficult.

- Alexei Mordashov

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that’s what’s happening now.

- Reed Hastings

The thing about the banjo is, when you first hear it, it strikes many people as ‘What’s that?’ There’s something very compelling about it to certain people; that’s the way I was; that’s the way a lot of banjo players and people who love the banjo are.

- Steve Martin

If you’ve found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.

- Bill Gates

Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX.

- Peter Thiel

It’s been a long career, and I’ve made some mistakes along the way.

- Rupert Murdoch

We’re taking these steps because of the continuing slowdown in the U.S. economy and initial signs of a slowdown expanding to other parts of the world.

- John Chambers

When one person yells the other should listen. When two people yell, there’s no communication.

- Dale Carnegie

Occasionally a man stumbles over the truth. Most dust themselves off and continue walking as though nothing had happened.

- Winston Churchill

Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.What makes someone an artist? I don’t think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren’t artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.That’s why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That’s why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He’s an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn’t care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it’s important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does.Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.

- Seth Godin

If you don’t see yourself as a winner, then you cannot perform as a winner.

- Zig Ziglar

Names are the sweetest, most important sound in any language.

- Dale Carnegie

China is a government-oriented economy. No one can say he can run his business entirely without government connections. Anybody who says that he or she can do things alone… is a hypocrite.

- Wang Jianlin

Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP.

- Peter Thiel

Momentum is a little fragile, and when people got excited before, they were disappointed, … But this is the most positive guidance we’ve given in eight quarters, going into a seasonally challenging quarter.

- John Chambers

There’s a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There’s a lot of sex, you know, in art. There’s a lot of naked women and men, and there’s intrigue, there’s fakery. It’s a real microcosm of the larger world.

- Steve Martin

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Your first projects aren’t the greatest things in the world, and they may have no money value, they may go nowhere, but that is how you learn – you put so much effort into making something right if it is for yourself.

- Steve Wozniak

Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.

- Jack Dorsey

My father died during open-heart surgery on March 29 of my senior year in college. I was getting set to go to law school. I remember sitting in the waiting room when the doctor walked in. I said to myself, The worst possible thing just happened. What will you do?

- Stephen Wynn

You’re not being responsible with what God gave you if you’re hanging out with time wasters who have no goals and no dreams.

- Joel Olsteen

We subpoenaed him for the SAP trial and he was on the lam. The HP board sent him to Bolivia to talk to customers. Then they sent him to Mongolia to talk to customers, just out of reach of the federal subpoenas … the board figured out [later]: we should have left Leo in Mongolia.

- Larry Ellison

It’s not going out to people who aren’t going to go shopping. You’ve already got the people who are shopping.

- Jack Taylor

Dear Sir: My ten years of bank experience should be of interest to a rapidly growing bank like yours. In various capacities in bank operations with the Bankers Trust Company in New York, leading to my present assignment as Branch Manager, I have acquired skills in all phases of banking including depositor relations, credits, loans and administration. I will be relocating to Phoenix in May and I am sure I can contribute to your growth and profit. I will be in Phoenix the week of April 3 and would appreciate the opportunity to show you how I can help your bank meet its goals. Sincerely.

- Dale Carnegie

I support Democrats and Republicans. And I’m telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.

- Stephen Wynn

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

- David Novak

You’ll never rise any higher than the way you see yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.

- Donald Trump

Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

- Brene Brown

People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.

- Zig Ziglar

[In February 2011] We’ve not done a lot of marketing whatsoever. A lot of it has just been word of mouth.

- Jack Dorsey

I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.

- George Soros

Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

- Peter Thiel

It’s true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.

- Peter Thiel

A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.

- Zig Ziglar

Around the survivors a perimeter create.

- Yoda

Ten or twelve men, especially between brothers and between fathers and sons; but the offspring of these unions are counted as the children of the man with whom a particular woman cohabited first.

- Winston Churchill

An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be.

- Steve Martin

Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.

- Winston Churchill

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

- Joel Olsteen

[On American running shoes] They cost five bucks and gave you blood blisters after five miles. Adidas was taking advantage. And at $30 a pair, Adidas was making a killing.

- Phil Knight

I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.

- Ben Horowitz

One who starts a business without written plans of any kind, without a pro-forma or any concept of their overall profitability per customer, yet believes that if they work hard enough and give enough money away to those in need that eventually they will not be in need.

- Clay Clark

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

- Dale Carnegie

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

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship…the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

- Peter Drucker

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

- Bill Gates

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

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