I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don’t laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that’s not real laughter.
- Steve Martin
Notable Quotables
When you walk in God’s favor, His blessings will chase you down and overtake you.
- Joel Olsteen
Whether you’re 9 or 90, stop trying to fix the things you’re bad at, and focus on the things you’re good at.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Your thoughts about your circumstances have you down. On the other hand, you can be in one of the biggest battles of your life, and still be filled with joy and peace and victory – if you simply learn how to choose the right thought. It’s time to think about what you’re thinking about.
- Joel Olsteen
There is a good chance India may become our largest total sales market in the whole of Asia.
- John Chambers
Companies should not have a singular view of profitability. There needs to be a balance between commerce and social responsibility… The companies that are authentic about it will wind up as the companies that make more money.
- Howard Schultz
Perhaps the most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.
- Ben Horowitz
Cherish your dreams as they are the children of your soul… –
- Napoleon Hill
A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don’t believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you’re likely to have issues.
- Larry Page
Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
I want to help people to help themselves, which is much more valuable for both sides than just making a donation. By training the child of a farmer you compound the value of that dollar spent on training since that child will now help their parents. This is the multiplier effect. There’s no point in just feeding them or just giving them money.
- Lee Shau Kee
Most poor people live in the poorest countries.
- Bill Gates
Last I looked – and I’m not a candidate – but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It’s most states are winners take all.
- Michael Bloomberg
It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them. The first month cost perhaps $200 more than if I had been micromanaging.
- Timothy Ferriss
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
We are not 100 percent there, but we are finding consensus.
- Jon Fredrik Baksaas
Business leaders cannot be bystanders.
- Howard Schultz
Starbucks has stores in America in many, many communities that are governed by many, many different municipalities. Starbucks cannot dictate to a municipality in Cincinnati or Kansas City or Sacramento how or why or when there should be a recycling program.
- Howard Schultz
In bad times and good, I have never lost my sense zest for life
- Walt Disney
People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.
- Zig Ziglar
I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
- Richard P. Feynman
Once Microsoft lost its grip on developers, it became only a matter of time before it lost its monopoly on operating systems.
- Ben Horowitz
In the game of life, before you get anything out, you must put something in!
- Zig Ziglar
Disneyland is the star, everything else is in the supporting role.
- Walt Disney
God, I’m ready. I’m taking the limits off of You. I’m enlarging my vision. I may not see a way but I know You have a way. I declare I’m coming into a shift.
- Joel Olsteen
Perhaps we have been guilty of some terminological inexactitudes.
- Winston Churchill
I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.
- Larry Ellison
It is very clear that the Republicans do not want to raise taxes.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.
- Henry Ford
Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.
- Bill Gates
If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you. You will.
- Dale Carnegie
Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.
- Sergey Brin
If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.
- Rupert Murdoch
If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning.
- Larry Page
There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.
- Peter Thiel
Unrelenting confidence was necessary.
- Ben Horowitz
I had this very rich sense of how the metropolis was living and breathing.
- Jack Dorsey
In the U.S. there are many people willing to work on $9 per hour, which is causing Tasmania to lose its famous apple industry and Australia to import more and more of its fruit and food from lower cost countries. In fact, all over Australia there are warning signs of us killing or restricting our own industries.
- Gina Rinehart
Education isn’t a problem until it serves as a buffer rom the world and a refuge from the risk of failure.
- Seth Godin
Don’t marry too early in life. It’s better to work hard when young and establish a career first.
- Lee Shau Kee
It is impossible to divide the interest of a country and a company that works on its soil.
- Vagit Alekperov
You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.
- Ben Horowitz
Faith doesn’t always instantly deliver you, but it always carries you through.
- Joel Olsteen
To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.
- Peter Drucker
I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.
- Elon Musk
It’s not always easy to get over some of those bumps in the road, those disillusionments and disappointments. It’s going to take a strong will. Sometimes, it may take courage. Sometimes nothing but faith in God and say, I refuse to be trapped in the past. I’m not going to let the past destroy my future. I’m pressing on. I’m straining forward, knowing that God has great things in store for me.
- Joel Olsteen
Write like you talk. Often.
- Seth Godin
Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine, so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form.
- Bill Gates
Velocity and drive comes from your desire to achieve.
- Jim Cathcart
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
- Bill Gates
It’s not like I’m anti-China. I just think it’s ridiculous that we allow them to do what they’re doing to this country, with the manipulation of the currency, that you write about and understand, and all of the other things that they do.
- Donald Trump
An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be.
- Steve Martin
The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.
- Winston Churchill
Great companies are built on great products.
- Elon Musk
[On signing up Michael Jordan in 1984 when he was just 21 years old] We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture.
- Phil Knight
Real leaders don’t care [about receiving credit]. If it’s about your mission, about spreading the faith, about seeing something happen, not only do you not care about credit, you actually want other people to take credit…There’s no record of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn’t the point. Change is.
- Seth Godin
Money isn’t everything , but it’s right up there with oxygen.
- Zig Ziglar
Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to cut all sources of retreat. Only by doing so can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win — essential to success.
- Napoleon Hill
Never be bothered by what people say, as long as you know in your heart you are right.
- Dale Carnegie
For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you [Charles de Gaulle] and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.
- Winston Churchill
and the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger will hold people in the palm of his or her hand”
- Dale Carnegie
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
- Larry Ellison
Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.
- P.T. Barnum
The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses.
- Napoleon Hill
All your ideas may be solid or even good .. But you have to Actually EXECUTE on them for them to matter.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
…The greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.
- Seth Godin
Customers today are strongly value oriented. But just what does that mean? Customers tell us that value means the results they receive in relation to the total costs (both the price and other costs to customers incurred in acquiring the service).
- Gary W. Lo
Cuando dos socios siempre están de acuerdo, uno de ellos no es necesario.
- Dale Carnegie
When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
- Thomas Edison
If it wasn’t a mystery, it would be easy. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.
- Seth Godin
Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.
- Reed Hastings
We are pleased to look back at another extremely successful financial year 2014 during which we achieved our targets.
- Elmar Degenhart
I have scary eyes. I look like the guy in ‘American History X,’ yes. I remember coming home from school and asking my mum if I could get an eye transplant, and of course she declined.
- Timothy Ferriss
David Novak CEO of YUM Brands (on crisis management)
- David Novak
I think our main real estate effort should be directed at getting out in front of expansion and letting the population build out to us.
- Sam Walton
If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.
- Bill Gates
Lack of ambition to aim above mediocrity.
- Napoleon Hill
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
Cooperativeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feelings as important as your own.
- Dale Carnegie
Bill Campbell developed an excellent methodology for measuring executives in a balanced way that will help you achieve this. He breaks performance down into four distinct areas.
- Ben Horowitz
The 1980s will seem like a walk in the park when compared to new global challenges, where annual productivity increases of 6% may not be enough. A combination of software, brains, and running harder will be needed to bring that percentage up to 8% or 9%.
- Jack Welch
Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I’ve never played with a band. I’ve always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn.
- Steve Martin
Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.
- Zig Ziglar
I think the idea of getting money out of politics is critical.
- Russell Simmons
Common Core is a big win for education.
- Bill Gates
What one does easily, one does well.
- Andrew Carnegie
I like to get people fired up, fill them with zeal for McDonald’s, and watch the results in their work.
- Ray Kroc
Expect more than others think possible.
- Howard Schultz
For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
- Peter Thiel
Lay out what you’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
- David Novak
I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.
- Bill Gates
Investing in courage and determination was an easy decision for me.
- Ben Horowitz
If you ask me whether the future is better than today, I would say yes; but the people must be ready to pay for services and pay their taxes.
- Aliko Dangote
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly–until you can learn to do it well.
- Zig Ziglar
Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It’s really a great invention and I wouldn’t under-estimate the value of that, but they’re not designed to take care of social needs.
- George Soros
If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.
- Ray Kroc
Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.
- Brian Tracy
The team with the best players wins.
- Jack Welch
