Notable Quotables

Soon will I rest, yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have. Twilight is upon me, soon night must fall.

- Yoda

People will always blame the poets for society’s ills. But these are the true artists.

- Russell Simmons

Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker – whom I had hired to manage the store from TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen and I had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could alone. We pledges houses and property, everything we had.. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.

- Sam Walton

Assetts put money in your pocket. Liabilities take money out of your pocket.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Already know you that which you need.

- Yoda

Whenever you are speaking, both your passion for your business and your appearance will have a lasting impact on your audience.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Somehow over the years people have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was… just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. But…it was an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since [1945]…. And like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.

- James C. Collins

HE RICH DON’T WORK FOR MONEY The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.

- Peter Thiel

Concentrate all of your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought into focus.

- Alexander Graham Bell

Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it’s cute but boring and expensive.

- P.J. O'Rourke

Remember, when you were made a leader you weren’t given a crown, you were given a responsibility to bring out the best in others. For that, your people need to trust you. And they will, as long as you demonstrate candor, give credit, and stay real.

- Jack Welch

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

- John C. Maxwell

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

To be Jedi is to face the truth, and choose. Give off light, or darkness, Padawan. Be a candle, or the night.

- Yoda

I tell people that we must have the courage to share what we feel, but no one follows me.

- Tadashi Yanai

They want good stories. They aren’t paid to say, no. They’re paid to say yes to the right stories.

- Michael Levine

If somebody’s going on your board, and you’re going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.

- Ben Horowitz

I know Bo Xilai well. But our relationship was based on our work, we didn’t have a personal relationship.

- Wang Jianlin

Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.

- Peter Thiel

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked, leadership is defined by results not attributes.

- Peter Drucker

Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.

- Seth Godin

I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.

- Howard Schultz

There’s a wonderful saying that’s dead wrong. ‘Why did you climb the mountain?’ ‘I climbed the mountain because it was there.’ That’s utter nonsense…You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.

- Larry Ellison

Thoughts mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire are powerful things.

- Napoleon Hill

It’s your ATTITUDE not your APTITUDE that ultimately determines your ALTITUDE!

- Zig Ziglar

es it’s thinner, but I wanted storage. I don’t have broadband at home, and you can’t get great broadband connection in hotels, so I carry all my personal media in the iPad. So I was hoping Apple has a 256GB iPad. I was hoping for more storage so I could put every episode of Big Bang Theory on my iPad. So I emailed my wife and said ‘nope, I don’t want one of those.

- Steve Wozniak

I did not like the way I looked in a pair of white pants.

- Sara Blakely

Personally, I think the failure to really kind of get his arms around this company and this industry led to confusion on behalf of the management team. And I didn’t see that getting any better.

- Phil Knight

Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.

- Peter Thiel

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

- Dale Carnegie

You’ll never achieve real success unless you like what you’re doing.

- Dale Carnegie

We must remember that our children are very much what we make them.

- Dale Carnegie

I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention…. Its their ‘ideas’ that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor….’

- Thomas Edison

The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance – and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.

- Oprah Winfrey

Happy the man, and happy he alone, He, who can call today his own: He who, secure within, can say: Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.

- Dale Carnegie

Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.

- James C. Collins

Those who are blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.

- Mary Kay Ash

If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.

- Elon Musk

Corporations that navigate through these rough times will prosper as the region inevitably enters a new era of prosperity.

- Cheng Yu-tung

[On a small business class taught at university by Frank Shallenberger] Shallenberger started by defining the type of person who was an entrepreneur, and I realized he was talking to me.

- Phil Knight

Expect the unexpected. And whenever possible, be the unexpected. I try to live by that on a daily basis.

- Jack Dorsey

Three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs. Most of the others are self-employed professionals, such as doctors and accountants.

- Thomas J Stanley

Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.

- John D. Rockefeller

I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion.

- Steve Wozniak

The Lack of Candor is the biggest and deepest darkest secrets of business…People might not have agree with me on every issue, and I may not have been right all the time, but they always knew they were getting it straight and honest.

- Jack Welch

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

- Thomas Edison

I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”

- Ben Horowitz

I believe that continued strong consumer acceptance of our products at retail and the strengthening of our organization will enable us to manage through the challenges in our U. S. footwear business and lay the foundation for another round of growth.

- Phil Knight

If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.

- Peter Thiel

My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.

- Jack Welch

the more ‘Yeses’ we can, at the very outset, induce, the more likely we are to succeed in capturing the attention for our ultimate proposal.

- Dale Carnegie

If your offering itself isn’t remarkable, then it’s invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.

- Seth Godin

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

- Bill Gates

At its zenith Sears accounted for more than 2 percent of all retail sales in the United States. It pioneered several innovations critical to the success of today’s most admired retailers: for example, supply chain management, store brands, catalogue retailing, and credit card sales. The esteem in which Sears’ management was held shows in this 1964 excerpt from Fortune: “How did Sears do it? In a way, the most arresting aspect of its story is that there was no gimmick. Sears opened no big bag of tricks, shot off no skyrockets. Instead, it looked as though everybody in its organization simply did the right thing, easily and naturally. And their cumulative effect was to create an extraordinary powerhouse of a company.

- Clayton M. Christensen

Well I think a lot of times we’re putting things off and I’m going to do it later. I’m going to break this bad habit or I’m going to pursue this dream or I’m going to treat my spouse better.

- Joel Olsteen

Save them [Luke and Leia], we must. They are our last hope.

- Yoda

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

- Bill Gates

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

- Dale Carnegie

We see no major changes in that model for the next several years. In fact, we are more optimistic about Cisco’s position and opportunities in both the enterprise and service provider markets than at any point in the last several years.

- John Chambers

Opportunity does not knock, it presents itself when you beat down the door.

- Kyle Chandler

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

- Walt Disney

The Loire Valley is grossly underestimated. The prices are fair, and the wines are real.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.

- Ben Horowitz

A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.

- James C. Collins

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

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

- James C. Collins

There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt.

- P.T. Barnum

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

A lovely nook of forest scenery, or a grand rock, like a beautiful woman, depends for much of its attractiveness upon the attendance sense of freedom from whatever is low; upon a sense of purity and of romance.

- P.T. Barnum

They were going to get it all right the first time right… Open to change.

- Jack Dorsey

I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control.

- Timothy Ferriss

hombre que conozco es superior a mí en algún sentido. En ese sentido, aprendo de él.

- Dale Carnegie

For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the products. But now we understand the most important thing we do is market the product… Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.

- Phil Knight

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

- Napoleon Hill

It never hurts a fool to appear before an audience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.

- Dale Carnegie

Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.

- Timothy Ferriss

My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.

- Jerry Seinfeld

My worry about the New York Times is that it’s got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we’d love to challenge it.

- Rupert Murdoch

It didn’t matter how bleak the situation or how stultifying their mediocrity, they all maintained unwavering faith that they would not just survive, but prevail as a great company. And yet, at the same time, they became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality.

- James C. Collins

It’s a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

- Steve Martin

When you throw dirt at people, you’re not doing a thing but losing ground.

- Zig Ziglar

We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend.

- Peter Thiel

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.

- Thomas Edison

Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.

- Wang Jianlin

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

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