Notable Quotables

In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.

- James C. Collins

Dad never had the kind of ambition or confidence to build much of a business on his own, and he didn’t believe in taking on debt. Sam Walton on the traits that make a great leader. It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

- Sam Walton

A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy, so (he keeps) coming back, which pleases the shareholder.

- Herb Kelleher

Experience has proven that the best educated people are often those who are known as self-made, or self-educated. It takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated is one who has learned to get whatever he wants in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists no so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and peristently applied. Men are paid nor merely for tha they know, but more particulary for what they do with that which they know.

- Napoleon Hill

I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.

- Larry Page

Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.

- Peter Thiel

I want to get involved in things that makes a difference in peoples lives and lifts them up. I don’t want to be a part of anything that’s not inspiring or helpful to the community that I’m serving.

- Russell Simmons

A man must choose his own way of life, and…it is only by following out one’s own bent that there can be the really harmonious life.

- Winston Churchill

You don’t have to choose between your business and your life. Rather, if you do it right, you get your business and your life. In fact, we strongly believe that the only way to build a truly scalable business is by radically reducing its reliance on you, the owner, and supporting that rapid growth through systems, team and internal business controls.

- Jeff Hoffman

Do or do not. There is no try.

- Yoda

If you run a corporation, your job is to maximize the return on investment for your investors. Good for you. But by the same token, we have to remember that corporations have no compassion. That’s why legislation and regulations are necessary.

- Russell Simmons

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.

- Bill Gates

Southwest Airlines have been such a people-first model for me for so long that it was inspiring just to be physically in a place I already knew so much about. Yet I didn’t fully understand just how far they are willing to go to get the right people in the right seats until well after our best practices tour when someone I know applied for an entry level position with the company.

- David Novak

Encouragement to others is something everyone can give. Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money, it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows?

- Joel Olsteen

Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!

- Timothy Ferriss

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.

- Dale Carnegie

What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.

- Warren Buffett

Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.

- Peter Thiel

We have the best flat land, you can grow anything in the cheapest possible way; turning Nigeria around is not really that difficult. Nigeria is really the best place to invest, it is one of the places to make money; all over the world it (Nigeria) is the best kept secret actually in terms of investment.

- Aliko Dangote

Most people believe that results matter. The idea that results matter is one that you have to keep letting go of. And most of the time, I believe it.

- Russell Simmons

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

- Winston Churchill

Not to have an adequate air force in the present state of the world is to compromise the foundations of national freedom and independence.

- Winston Churchill

I believe in motivating with humor. … – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands

- David Novak

Some companies out there quote a start of production that is substantially in advance of when customers get their cars.

- Elon Musk

You know, I start with the assumption that -or with, with the belief that this president has to succeed. We all have an enormous amount of capital invested in his success. His success is the country’s success.

- Michael Bloomberg

On this basis, we intend to increase the dividend for the third time in a row. We are proposing a distribution of €3.25 per share, corresponding to a dividend payout ratio of 27.4 percent, which is again up slightly on the previous year’s level.

- Elmar Degenhart

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

- Bill Gates

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Faith is about trusting God when you have unanswered questions.

- Joel Olsteen

Of course, the challenge of being the initiator is that you’ll be wrong. You’ll pick the wrong thing, you’ll waste time, you’ll be blamed. This is why being an initiator is valuable. Most people shy away from the challenge. They’ve been too abused, they’re too fearful, they hold back, they’re happy to let someone else take the heat. Initiative is scarce. Hence valuable. Ditch digging is not scarce. It’s not hard at all to find manual labor at minimum wage, which is precisely why manual labor gets paid minimum wage. 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

People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation.

- Soren Kierkegaard

If you want to reap financial blessings, you have to sow financially.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

- Peter Drucker

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?

- Winston Churchill

Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires.

- Seth Godin

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

Similar to all of you, we would like to see higher growth.

- John Chambers

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy–sun, wind and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

- Thomas Edison

Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.

- Ben Horowitz

I love the freedom of movement that my phone gives me. That has definitely transformed my life.

- Richard Branson

Do more than you are being paid to do, and you’ll eventually be paid more for what you do.

- Zig Ziglar

The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

- Ralph Nader

Nobody wanted to believe Jack Ma.

- Jack Ma

He listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.

- Ron Chernow

There should be order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.

- Ma Huateng

For any Silicon Valley company, the most important thing is the company. And any great founders need to get out of the way of the company. We presented a spark with an idea.

- Jack Dorsey

We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger, how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.

- Winston Churchill

I came over from Wal-Mart to help set up Sam’s. Since we were patterned after PRICE CLUBS, sometimes we copied them without exactly knowing what we were doing. We were bringing a West Coast idea to the Midwest, and we didn’t know how it would be received. I remember one idea that didn’t transfer too well. Price Club had a huge stack of wine in front of its stores. We bought the same amound for our stores in the Midwest and we learned the hard way that Midwesterners aren’t exactly wine drinkers. (on competition)

- Ron Loveles

There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.

- Bill Gates

But Governments and peoples do not always take rational decisions. Sometimes they take mad decisions, or one set of people get control who compel all others to obey and aid them in folly.

- Winston Churchill

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

- Sergey Brin

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

- Winston Churchill

I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.

- Warren Buffett

Frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

- Jeff Bezos

New customers are silver…loyal customers are gold.

- Anonymous

When I first joined the Irvine Company, I realized that less than 11,000 acres were designated as open space in the original master plan, and that just didn’t seem adequate to me. So, I began the lengthy process working with public and community organizations to add more open space.

- Donald Bren

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

- Henry Ford

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

Strive to be the very best you can be. Run the race against yourself and not the guy in the other lane. The reason I say that is, as long as you give it 110% you are going to succeed. But as long as you’re trying to beat the guy over there, you are worried about him; you’re not worrying about how you’ve got to perform

- Herschel Walker

I’ve always wanted to be a businessman. No other ambitions, I just wanted to be in business, even when I was a child in Fujian province, south China.

- Henry Sy

Southwest consistently turns a profit because they have an employee ownership program that gives their employees a sense of ownership that is very real. When the company does well financially, the employees do well financially. When the company struggles, the employees struggle.

- Clay Clark

Who am I winning for? Am I winning for Oracle shareholders or is it simply a matter of personal vanity? I’ll admit to it. Mea culpa. An awful lot of it is personal vanity.

- Larry Ellison

Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to ‘gamble’ on an unknown.

- Zig Ziglar

EBay is a great company. There are a lot of good assets and good customers, and the U.S. people love it.

- Jack Ma

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

- Bill Gates

It is clothes. It is parts. Therefore, you combine the parts differently to create your own unique expression.

- Tadashi Yanai

We all must recognize that homeland security funds should be allocated by threat and no other reason.

- Michael Bloomberg

I don’t make deals for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it.

- Donald Trump

The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

- George Lucas

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

- Peter Drucker

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

- Napoleon Hill

The door to a balanced success opens wide on the hinges of hope and encouragement.

- Zig Ziglar

I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

- Joel Olsteen

This office is smaller than the last one I had. I’m not trying to impress people. I want to be close to them.

- Stephen Wynn

Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading about in the newspaper the next day.

- Joel Olsteen

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without vicory there is no survival.

- Winston Churchill

I’m a little unusual: I’m a six-person-or-less extrovert.

- Reid Hoffman

Above all, you want to create something you’re proud of. This has always been my philosophy of business. I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive, then I believe you are better off not doing it.

- Richard Branson

One challenge is the Peter Principle. Coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book of that name, the Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain being unable to earn further promotions.

- Ben Horowitz

Like it or not, life is a series of competitions. You may be competing for a grade, a spot on a team, a job, or the largest account in town. The higher your self-esteem is, the better you get along with yourself, with others, and the more you’ll accomplish.

- Harvey Mackay

In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.

- Ray Dalio

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

- Bill Gates

Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash. How’s that for incentive to be effective and efficient?

- Timothy Ferriss

I hate politics. What they say and what they do is completely different.

- Tadashi Yanai

Opportunity is often missed because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.

- Thomas Edison

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