Notable Quotables

You must not ever think that anything is common sense.

- Clay Clark

The bigger we get as a company, the more important it becomes for us to shift responsibility and authority toward the front lines, toward the department manager who’s stocking the shelves and talking to the customer. When we were much smaller, I probably wasn’t as quick to catch on to this idea as I do should have been. But as an avid student of management theory, back in the mid-seventies I started reading the work of W. Edwards Deming, the famous statistician who taught so much to the Japanese about improving their productivity and competitiveness.

- Sam Walton

It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot . .

- Zig Ziglar

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

- Winston Churchill

Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.

- Jack Welch

Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurt his sense of importance and arouses resentment.

- Dale Carnegie

Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.

- John C. Maxwell

You can follow your favorite company or organization. You can also mix that in with your family and your social network and talk about all these interests in real time. That’s the value, not the brand ‘Twitter.’ Twitter just provides the venue for it.

- Jack Dorsey

I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

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

Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.

- Peter Drucker

I think you have a danger of regulating, putting regulations in place which will mean there will be no press in 10 years to regulate.

- Rupert Murdoch

Opportunity is walking through your life every day in the form of people you meet.

- Zig Ziglar

We got to know a lot of investors and know what they like and don’t like. Through many co-investments opportunities, we have built trust among these investors. So when it came to investing in Xiaomi, things were a lot easier.

- Lei Jun

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

- Ben Horowitz

Most often I am only interested in an idea if it’s going to get hundreds of millions of users. That’s the scale that I am always trying to play to.

- Reid Hoffman

The garden gleams with summer jewelry. We live vy simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & well provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy.

- Winston Churchill

If people like you they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.

- Zig Ziglar

If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.

- Mark Zuckerberg

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

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it’s digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules – not just for governments but for private companies.

- Bill Gates

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

- Dale Carnegie

The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.

- Thomas Edison

As one’s fortunes are reduced, one spirit must expand to fill the void.

- Winston Churchill

There’s a finite market for DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming.

- Reed Hastings

The student who elects to risk it all—which is nothing—to establish an online video rental service that delivers $5,000 per month in income from a small niche of Blu-ray aficionados, a two-hour-per-week side project that allows him to work full-time as an animal rights lobbyist.

- Timothy Ferriss

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

- Jeff Bezos

Everyone deserves at least a chance to make things better. And besides people can surprise you.

- David Novak

To make a ton of steel on and half tons of iron stone has to be mined, transported by rail a hundred miles to the Lakes, carried by boat hundreds of miles, transferred to cars, transported by rail 150 miles to Pittsburgh; one and a half tons of coal must be mined and manufactured into coke and carried 50 (odd) miles by rail; and one ton of limestone mined and carried 150 miles to Pittsburgh. How then could steel be manufactured and sold without loss at 3 pounds for 2 cents. This, I confess seemed to me incredible, and little less than miraculous, but it was so.

- Andrew Carnegie

Fascinatingly, as companies begin to struggle, the third category always seems to grow much faster than the first. In addition, the sudden wave of “semi-performance-related attrition” usually happens in companies that claim to have a “super-high talent bar.” How do all these superstar employees suddenly go from great to crap?

- Ben Horowitz

What material success does is provide you with the ability to concentrate on other things that really matter. And that is being able to make a difference, not only in your own life, but in other people’s lives.

- Oprah Winfrey

One evening, intending to ask my host mother to wake me the next morning (okosu), I ask her to violently rape me (okasu). She is very confused.

- Timothy Ferriss

I will everyday as just a blow from my blade against a mighty oak…strike until it falls quote.

- Og Mandino

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

- Bill Gates

Certainly, other people can pray for you, they can believe for you, they can quote the scripture to you, but you must exercise faith for yourself. If you are always depending on somebody else to keep you happy, somebody else to encourage you or to get you out of trouble, you will live in perpetual weakness and disappointment. You must make a decision that you are going to be a believer. Take charge of your life and decide, No matter what comes against me, I believe in God. I’m going to have a positive outlook for my life! Other people’s faith can indeed bolster yours. But your own faith will bring you a miracle much faster than anybody else’s. What you believe has a much greater impact on your life than what anybody else believes.

- Joel Olsteen

The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor.

- Jack Welch

Chinese people, young people, they don’t go shopping a lot in department stores. All department store guys hate me. They say business is bad because of Jack.

- Jack Ma

Branding is what people think about you before they even know you.

- Bryan Smith

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

Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.

- Winston Churchill

Substantial growth in GDP, rising wages, improved employment prospects and favourable bank mortgage terms have all resulted in a buoyant property market.

- Lee Shau Kee

We have an average household net worth of $3.7 million. Of course, some of our cohorts have accumulated much more. Nearly 6 percent have a net worth of over $10 million. Again, these people skew our average upward. The typical (median, or 50th percentile) millionaire household has a net worth of $1.6 million.

- Thomas J Stanley

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

- Dale Carnegie

Witchcraft is one of the most baseless, absurd, disgusting and silly of all the humbugs.

- P.T. Barnum

Foreplay, cuddling – a Jedi craves not these things.

- Yoda

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

- Winston Churchill

People of excellence go the extra mile to do what’s right.

- Joel Olsteen

Any time a company grows as fast as Wal-Mart has, pockets of duplication are going to build up, and there will be areas of the business which we may no longer need. No boss or employee really likes to dwell on such matters; it’s only human nature not to want to have your job, or the jobs of the people who work for you, eliminated. But it is absolutely the responsibility of a company’s top management to be thinking about this issue all the time – to ensure the sound future for the overall company.

- Sam Walton

Take time to be kind and to say ‘thank you.’

- Zig Ziglar

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked

- Warren Buffett

If you can discipline yourself to read, you can free up two years of your life for the good stuff!

- Seth Godin

If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio’s market value

- Warren Buffett

I’ve always believed that there are funny people everywhere, but they’re just not comedians. In fact, some of my best comedic inspirations were not professional entertainers.

- Steve Martin

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t.

- Ben Horowitz

You got to be rigorous in your appraisal system. The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.

- Jack Welch

Advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away, it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later.

- Peter Thiel

Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.

- Jeff Bezos

Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don’t know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.

- Sam Walton

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.

- Winston Churchill

The people’s ability to achieve is determined by their leader’s ability to empower.

- Napoleon Hill

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

- Bill Gates

People think, ‘Jack, you do too much.’

- Jack Ma

The profile of homebuyers in Hong Kong is becoming more diverse and a wider range of marketing channels is thus needed to promote the Group’s Hong Kong property projects.

- Lee Shau Kee

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

- Bill Gates

Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise.

- Dale Carnegie

If you’ll dare to take your mind off your troubles, get your mind off your own needs and, instead, seek to be a blessing to other people, God will do more for you than you could even ask or think.

- Joel Olsteen

The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,

- Peter Thiel

Meeting sports athletes that are the best in the world is a thrill to this day.

- Phil Knight

We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions.

- Phil Knight

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.

- Jeff Bezos

Challenges will present us a good opportunity to improve productivity.

- Cheng Yu-tung

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

The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American.

- Winston Churchill

There is no elevator to success…you have to take the stairs.

- Zig Ziglar

When I’m bored or tired of being blonde, I’ll throw on a wig. It’s a lot less of a permanent way to change your look, and I have about 10 – all different colors, shapes, bobs, long hair, short, feathered.

- Sara Blakely

There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. It’s not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well.

- George Soros

Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

- Ray Dalio

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others.

- Dale Carnegie

When enough people care about autism or diabetes or global warming, it helps everyone, even if only a tiny fraction actively participate.

- Seth Godin

Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new.

- Og Mandino

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