Frank Wells 1888 instruction to his agents: The most polite and gentlemanly treatment of all customers, however insignificant in their business, is insisted upon. Proper respect must be shown to all – let them be men, women or children, rich or poor, white or black – it must not be forgotten, that the company is dependent on these people for its business.
- Frank Wells
Notable Quotables
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
- Winston Churchill
With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.
- Oprah Winfrey
There is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.
- Winston Churchill
What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.
- Elon Musk
Hewlett Packard Chairman Built Company by Design, Calculator by Chance.
- James C. Collins
Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.
- Reed Hastings
We’re getting hurt, but I’m a long-term investor.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
The customer reaction to Dell going private has been a lot more positive than I would have ever imagined. Customers see it as – ‘You don’t have to be distracted. Now you can totally focus on your business.’ So they see it as a positive.
- Michael Dell
Rockefeller’s supreme insight was that he could solve the oil industry’s problems by solving the railroad’s problems at the same time, creating a double cartel in oil and rails. One of Rockefeller’s strength in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted and what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advanteous terms. Instead of ruining the railroads, Rockefeller tried to help them prosper, albeit in away that fortified his own position.
- Ron Chernow
Most of the reason we don’t do things is because we’re afraid to fail. I just made a decision one day that I was not going to do things in my life because of fear.
- Sara Blakely
Churchill kept perspective on the crowds that gathered to hear him speak by conceding they would be twice as big if gathered to see him hanged.
- Winston Churchill
Play the game for more than you can afford to lose . . . only then will you learn the game.
- Zig Ziglar
You can’t buy a good reputation, you must earn it.
- Harvey Mackay
Regardless of what position people originally took, once the decision is made, everyone supports it. That’s why it is critical that no one hold anything back during the discussion.
- Patrick M. Lencioni
I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.
- Bill Gates
Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?
- Michael Bloomberg
It’s the next opportunity that keeps us motivated.
- Zig Ziglar
Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.
- Howard Schultz
My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.
- Bill Gates
When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization.
- Peter Thiel
Time – the one asset none of us are ever gonna get more of.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
God puts people in our lives on purpose so we can help them succeed and help them become all He created them to be. Most people will not reach their full potential without somebody else believing in them.
- Joel Olsteen
I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.
- Oprah Winfrey
God doesn’t look at how much we do, but with how much love we do it.
- Mother Teresa
Initiative = Happiness
- Seth Godin
I can’t afford to be indifferent to politics, but I don’t have personal ambitions.
- Vagit Alekperov
When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I’d get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.
- Jerry Seinfeld
When I finally retire, I just want to go away so no one has to listen to me.
- Steve Martin
We don’t have the luxury of time. We spend more because of how we live, but it’s important to be with our family and friends.
- Sara Blakely
There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
- Jeff Bezos
People need a goal to galvanize them.
- Napoleon Hill
The computer is a moron.
- Peter Drucker
Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.
- Peter Drucker
I’m a lad of the ‘60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.
- Richard Branson
Money is not the motivating force. It’s nice to have money, but I don’t live high. What I enjoy is running the business.
- Rupert Murdoch
I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.
- Bill Gates
Newport Center has become a Mediterranean town. The climate here is the same as the Mediterranean’s, and so is the architecture. This center exudes a radiance, an energy. It will become a special way of life for everyone.
- Donald Bren
I’ve built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players…I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other. Because they’ve never had a chance to do that before. And they don’t want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates.
- Steve Jobs
God is a good God, and He gives good things to his children. No matter who has denigrated you or how much pain you’ve experienced in life, no matter how many setbacks you have suffered, you cannot allow yourself to accept that as the way life is supposed to be. No, God has better things in store for you. You must reprogram your mind with God’s word; change that negative, defeated self-image, and start seeing yourself as winning, coming out on top. Start seeing that marriage as restored. See your business as flourishing. See your children as enjoying the good things of God. You must see it through your eyes of faith, and then it will begin to happen.
- Joel Olsteen
An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.
- Ben Horowitz
In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
I believe God gives you the grace to do what you need to do.
- Joel Olsteen
Proclaim this among the nations: Prepare war. Stir up the mighty men. Let all the warriors draw near. Let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, And your pruning hooks into spears. Let the weak say, I am strong.
- Joel 3:9
Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they’re not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.
- Bill Gates
Nine out of ten businesses fail, so I came up with a foolproof plan — create ten businesses.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Everybody is going to have their critics. It’s easy to get discouraged in life.
- Joel Olsteen
I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.
- Winston Churchill
Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.
- Clayton M. Christensen
If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
- Warren Buffett
My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The most obvious market segment in email-based payments was the millions of emigrants still using Western Union to wire money to their families back home. Our product made that effortless, but the transactions were too infrequent.
- Peter Thiel
There certainly is a case to be made that taxes should be more progressive.
- Bill Gates
That was annoying but not entirely unexpected. It’s not a huge shock, given what’s going on down there.
- Ed Clark
Soon will I rest, yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have. Twilight is upon me, soon night must fall.
- Yoda
Our schools are not teaching students to think. It is astonishing how many young people have difficulty in putting their brains definitely and systematically to work….
- Thomas Edison
I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t won that AOL deal
- Sergey Brin
I am what I am and, you know, I’m a very lucky guy.
- Michael Bloomberg
If you start today to do the right thing, you are already a success even if it doesn’t show yet.
- John C. Maxwell
First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.
- Peter Thiel
Starbucks is in my blood. It is such a part of me that letting it unravel simply was not an option.
- Howard Schultz
Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they’re rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.
- Bill Gates
Execution begins with a vision and your people saying, I understand it. I’m excited about it. I can help make it happen.
- David Novak
I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.
- Joel Osteen
Faith is about trusting God when you have unanswered questions.
- Joel Olsteen
For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary.
- Peter Thiel
First and foremost, there is a difference between being perceived as an expert and being one. In the context of business, the former is what sells product and the latter, relative to your minimal customer base,” is what creates good products and prevents returns.
- Timothy Ferriss
Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.
- Stephen R. Covey
You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.
- Walt Disney
We need to reinvent food at Starbucks. Less could be more.
- Howard Schultz
Unrelenting confidence was necessary.
- Ben Horowitz
I like the idea that one thing leads to another. You can tweet something completely innocuous, and then find yourself going off on a tangent that’s inspired by a response.
- Steve Martin
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
- Peter Thiel
You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.
- Dale Carnegie
Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model.
- Michael Gerber
We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.
- Winston Churchill
Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.
- Dale Carnegie
Consumers are spontaneous and if you can catch their attention, that’s going to increase the chance that they will look at your product.
- Jack Taylor
Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.
- Colin Powell
The thing that’s confusing for investors is that founders don’t know how to be CEO. I didn’t know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don’t know how to be CEOs, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn. The question is… can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
- Ben Horowitz
The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.
- Timothy Ferriss
A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.
- Winston Churchill
The time is always right to do what is right.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
- Albert Einstein
Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.
- Bill Gates
We have not journeyed all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
- Winston Churchill
But no parties could live under such labels as Petitioners and Abhorrers. Instead of naming themselves they named each other. The term “Whig” had described a sour, bigoted, canting, money-grubbing Scots Presbyterian. Irish Papist bandits ravaging estates and manor-houses had been called “Tories”.
- Winston Churchill
Every company starts only once.
- Peter Thiel
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.
- Sergey Brin
I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don’t believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me.
- Ronald Perelman
Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
- Ben Horowitz
If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.
- Jack Welch
The Group has not been deterred by any negative sentiment and will as ever respond to the challenges and opportunities ahead of us with the same spirit of caution, flexibility, determination and dynamism, which have brought much success to us in the past.
- Cheng Yu-tung
If there is to be a low-cost Uber, Uber will be the low-cost Uber.
- Travis Kalanick
Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.
- Sam Walton
From wherever you are, you can go anywhere you want to go if you pick the right roads to travel.
- Zig Ziglar
