Notable Quotables

Creative leaders inherently know when rules need to be challenged, and they can see when a more flexible approach should be taken.

- John C. Maxwell

When the Internet first came, I thought it was just the beacon of freedom. People could communicate with anyone, anywhere, and nobody could stop it.

- Steve Wozniak

Within the Nasdaq as an example, I do believe that out of the top 100 companies … half of them will not be around five years from now.

- John Chambers

The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is ‘Don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.’

- Ben Horowitz

There is no way of making a business successful that can vie with the policy of promoting those who render exceptional service.

- Andrew Carnegie

The world of the 1990s and beyond will not belong to ‘managers’ or those who can make the numbers dance. The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders – people who not only have enormous amounts of energy but who can energize those whom they lead.

- Jack Welch

I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I’m working at it.

- Steve Martin

If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you.

- Dale Carnegie

Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.

- Sam Walton

We are pleased to look back at another extremely successful financial year 2014 during which we achieved our targets.

- Elmar Degenhart

Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.

- Timothy Ferriss

You know, in Saudi Arabia, there is a body of 40 people – 34 people exactly, that once the succession comes, they will meet and they will elect a king in there.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Too many companies think they want to do a video blog to sell merchandise, but if you turn your site into QVC, you lose. I have an audience that trusts me. It’s about building a global brand – not selling four more bottles of Pinot Grigio.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

People ask me what’s the most important function when you’re starting an organization or setting up the kind of culture and values that are going to endure. The discipline I believe so strongly in is H.R., and its the last discipline that gets funded.

- Howard Schultz

Hope is the power that gives a person the confidence to step out and try.

- Zig Ziglar

You were designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness.

- Zig Ziglar

…[if you] use discrimination in the selection of your Master Mind group, your objective will have been half-way reached, even before you begin to recognize it.

- Napoleon Hill

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?

- Marshall Bruce Mathers III

The only way to solve the problem of Boko Haram is to create jobs.

- Aliko Dangote

Do extremely difficult work.That seems obvious, right? If you do something that’s valued but scarce because it’s difficult, you’re more likely to be in demand and to be compensated fairly for what you do.The implication is stunning, though: When designing a project or developing a skill, seek out the most difficult parts to master and contribute. If it’s easy, it’s not for you.

- Seth Godin

Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass…if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass…slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own…structure.

- Dale Carnegie

Failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. This way, it is about answering to yourself.

- Sara Blakely

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn’t willing to.

- Bill Gates

But entrepreneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriously.

- Peter Thiel

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

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

Apply the blacksmith’s homely principle when you are speaking. If you feel deeply about your subject you will be able to think of little else. Concentration is a process of distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say—fill your mind with your speech-material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m getting better. I’m improving. My health is coming back,” those words began to create a new image on the inside. Before long, they started seeing themselves strong, healthy, and whole.

- Joel Olsteen

I saw a report yesterday. There’s so much oil, all over the world, they don’t know where to dump it. And Saudi Arabia says, ‘Oh, there’s too much oil.’ They – they came back yesterday. Did you see the report? They want to reduce oil production. Do you think they’re our friends? They’re not our friends.

- Donald Trump

If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman.

- Phil Knight

Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I’d try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, ‘This is the end.’ I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.

- Rupert Murdoch

Failing is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night.

- Zig Ziglar

Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

- Jeff Bezos

If you go out looking for friends, you’re going to find they are very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.

- Zig Ziglar

Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof when your own doorstep is unclean.

- Confucius

An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.

- Seth Godin

I try to keep in touch with the details… I also look at the product daily. That doesn’t mean you interfere, but it’s important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what’s happening.

- Rupert Murdoch

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

- Napoleon Hill

The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.

- Larry Ellison

99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns. We are going to live through a devastating social media bubble.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

You must have a vision and not just a vision but you must have a plan that would make you fulfil that vision.

- Aliko Dangote

We understand the most important thing we do is market the product…

- Phil Knight

Men sometimes stumble over the truth, but often pick themselves up and hurry off as though nothing had happened.

- Winston Churchill

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

- Warren Buffett

Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

- Dale Carnegie

We beat our expectations in the run up to Christmas and this time last year we had particularly high stock levels leading to a bigger clearance.

- Simon Wolfson

You spend so much time in the world of virtual that the actual – which nothing is more actual than stand-up – it’s a painful experience for the audience, and the comedian a lot of time – we miss that.

- Jerry Seinfeld

God, I’m not going to look at what I don’t have. I’m looking unto you. I know in my weakness, you show up the strongest.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Know what your brand stands for an exaggerate it in everything you do.

- David Novak

My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.

- Jack Ma

The thing about fashion – it’s like ducks going quack, quack quack. It’s being dictated from above, and it just makes me want to rebel against it.

- Sara Blakely

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

- Ben Horowitz

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

- Elon Musk

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.

- Malcolm X

The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there.

- Jack Welch

I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.

- Larry Ellison

JANUARY 16 Reach Out by Faith For she said to herself, If only I may touch His garment, I shall be made well.” But Jesus turned around, and when He saw her He said, Be of good cheer, daughter; your faith has made you well.” MATTHEW 9:21–22 NKJV ONE FELLOW WHOSE MARRIAGE was on the verge of dissolution told me, Joel, I’ve been this way for a long time. Nothing good ever happens to me. I don’t see how my marriage can be restored. We’ve always had these problems.” Those wrong attitudes will keep you from receiving the good things God wants to pour out in your life,” I told him. Stop dwelling on negative, destructive thoughts that keep you in a rut. Your life will change when you change your thinking.” God has so much more in store for him, and for you as well. If you want to see God’s far and beyond favor, you have to start believing it, seeing it, and speaking it.

- Joel Olsteen

Momentum is a little fragile, and when people got excited before, they were disappointed, … But this is the most positive guidance we’ve given in eight quarters, going into a seasonally challenging quarter.

- John Chambers

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.

- Seth Godin

A Timid Trapeze Artist Is a Dead Trapeze Artist.

- Seth Godin

Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself.

- Dale Carnegie

To me there is no picture so beautiful as smiling, bright-eyed, happy children; no music so sweet as their clear and ringing laughter.

- P.T. Barnum

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

- Ben Horowitz

Life is not a portfolio: not for a startup founder, and not for any individual. An entrepreneur cannot “diversify” herself: you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and then hope that one of them works out well. Less obvious but just as important, an individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible careers in ready reserve.

- Peter Thiel

Well, I am a Republican, and I would run as a Republican. And I have a lot of confidence in the Republican Party. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the president. I think what’s happening to this country is unbelievably bad. We’re no longer a respected country.

- Donald Trump

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

- Richard P. Feynman

I know when one door closes God will open up another door. What was meant for my harm God will use to my advantage. I’m not only coming out, I will come out better off than I was before.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Phil Knight

The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.

- Jim Collins

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I’ve got kids and responsibilities, so I can’t be my own test pilot. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it’s a sensible thing to do.

- Elon Musk

The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the future is.

- Yoda

To all of us comes that moment in life when we are literally tapped on the shoulder to do a very special thing unique to ourselves and our talents. What a pity if that moment finds us unprepared.

- Winston Churchill

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

- Dale Carnegie

What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving.

- Steve Martin

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.

- Peter Thiel

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

- Benjamin Disraeli

I am a tightwad. That’s one of the main reasons I completed a long questionnaire for a crispy $1 bill. Why else would I spend two or three hours being personally interviewed by these authors? They paid me $100, $200, or $250. Oh, they made me another offer–to donate in my name the money I earned for my interview to my favorite charity. But I told them, I am my favorite charity.

- Thomas J Stanley

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

- Winston Churchill

Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.

- Zig Ziglar

[On exporting sports shoes from Japan to the US]The best hope for exports lay with Onitsuka Company. So I made a cold call on them.

- Phil Knight

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional. We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double-down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success.

- Jeff Bezos

In Germany they had no kings. They developed them in Britain from leaders who claimed descent from the ancient gods.

- Winston Churchill

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known

- Walt Disney

Luck plays a role in business but whether you succeed or fail depends on many other factors. I haven’t really had a failure.

- Lui Che Woo

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