Notable Quotables

Early must I rise. Leave now you must!

- Yoda

Yes, they broke the law, but we can’t deport them. Let’s get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it – they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need.

- Michael Bloomberg

Ultimately, we wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.

- Phil Knight

Just because something didn’t work out your way, or somebody disappointed you, that does not change who you are.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Winston Churchill

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

Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it.

- Rick Warren

All companies of any size have to continue to push to make sure you get the right leaders, the right team, the right people to be fast acting, and fast moving in the marketplace. We’ve got great leaders, and we continue to attract and promote great new leaders.

- Steve Ballmer

The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

- Peter Thiel

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

- Henry Ford

People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest …But here is the point: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. If the currency issued by the People were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold.

- Thomas Edison

We are pleased to report the 33rd consecutive quarter of revenue and earnings growth. We are especially pleased with the balanced growth rate across almost all countries in both Europe and the Americas.

- John Chambers

Education isn’t a problem until it serves as a buffer rom the world and a refuge from the risk of failure.

- Seth Godin

Our job as founders as entrepreneurs is to distribute the future that’s already here.

- Jack Dorsey

I think every Internet user likes personalization.

- Ma Huateng

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It’s very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

- Jeff Bezos

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

It doesn’t matter who likes you or doesn’t like you, all that matters is that God likes you. He accepts you, he approves of you.

- Joel Olsteen

Forty-five years ago, when I was 18, I came to San Francisco by boat and took two weeks to get here. I had a great impression. I think San Francisco is the welcoming gate for people from Asia.

- Tadashi Yanai

Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

- Peter Thiel

You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.

- Reid Hoffman

Life is actually far better than it is in the movies. And it takes longer.

- Seth Godin

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure – the law firms, the real estate, all that – that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

- Elon Musk

Young people in China and Hong Kong are the future of the motherland.

- Cheng Yu-tung

From a global CEO and government leader perspective, we remain in a `show- me’ economy.

- John Chambers

Our line of business structure has served us very well in the past, when customer segments and product requirements were very distinct. Today, the differences have blurred between these customer segments and Cisco is in a unique position to provide the industry’s broadest family of products united under a consistent architecture designed to help our customers improve productivity and profitability.

- John Chambers

Most business people today are not going to invest in the uncertainty that exists in America.

- Howard Schultz

Humility is becoming a lost art, but it’s not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.

- Harvey Mackay

We can’t have democracy if we’re having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we’ve never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

- Larry Page

We’re working toward the ability for all Cisco devices to work together and communicate with each other to stop attacks. The idea is that one device can warn another device of a threat.

- John Chambers

Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.

- George Soros

Quality is a cornerstone of the [Henderson] Group underpinning all our activities.

- Lee Shau Kee

Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward!

- Thomas Edison

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

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”

- Ben Horowitz

The reason I was able to grow my business was that every day, after producing 30 minutes of wine television, I spent 15 hours a day replying to every single person’s e-mail and every single person’s Twitter @ reply.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.

- Zig Ziglar

It’s really complex to make something simple…

- Jack Dorsey

Anyone that makes me a quarter of a billion dollars, I like.

- Carl Icahn

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.

- Herb Kelleher

I enjoy the hunt much more than the ‘good life’ after the victory.

- Carl Icahn

No one has any idea what’s next… the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it’s delaying the recovery.

- Stephen Wynn

To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.

- Thomas Edison

Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.

- Mark Zuckerberg

The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.

- Seth Godin

Anytime you look at anything that’s considered artistic, there’s a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can’t exist without it.

- Steve Martin

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 resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.

- Andrew Carnegie

Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.

- Elon Musk

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

- Anatole France

Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed, A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden of weeds.

- John D. Rockefeller

The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

- Peter Thiel

Even with cameras being very cheap, one thing that researchers noticed was that you look really bad in a videoconference image because the lighting is bad and you get shadows and things.

- Bill Gates

One can get anything if he is willing to help enough others get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

[On Twitter and Japan] We’ve had massive success in Japan… In Japan, it’s not 140 characters, it’s 140 words. So you could write a little mini-novel. This is a whole story in the universe.

- Jack Dorsey

A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.

- Arnold Glasow

The story about GE that hasn’t been told is the value of an informal place. I think it’s a big thought. I don’t think people have ever figured out that being informal is a big deal.

- Jack Welch

I want the services to look and sound like the Grammys. It’s not showy, but we represent God, and it should be first class.

- Joel Olsteen

We’re still in a recession. We’re not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.

- Warren Buffett

There are abundant business opportunities to bring about the recovery of the local economy.

- Lee Shau Kee

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

I shopped for body shapers for the first time in my life and I was horrified. They were thick – it was like wearing workout clothes and they all had a leg band on one side that showed through the pants.

- Sara Blakely

Getting knocked down in life is a given. Getting up and moving forward is a choice.

- Zig Ziglar

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world

- George Washington Carver

Wonder what your customer really wants? Ask. Don’t tell.

- Lisa Stone

India has over 20 percent of the kids born in the world. And they move around a lot.

- Bill Gates

Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.

- Richard Branson

Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are commmon and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields – from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us. That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. And there is such a strategy – though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies. It is a checklist.

- Atul Gawande

Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind.

- Winston Churchill

This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.

- Peter Thiel

Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer.

- Seth Godin

I’m optimistic about the country. I’m optimistic about the American people.

- Howard Schultz

What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away.

- Jack Dorsey

China is investing in factories in Eastern Europe, not because their labor costs are lower, but because they want to be closer to their markets.

- Michael Bloomberg

I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.

- Timothy Ferriss

Well, all comedy starts with anger. You get angry, and its never for a good reason, right? You know its not a good reason. And then you try and work it from there.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end.

- Napoleon Hill

A goal without real consequences is wishful thinking. Good follow-through doesn’t depend on the right intentions. It depends on the right incentives.

- Timothy Ferriss

And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.

- Seth Godin

Most people have bosses who hire them to fill a slot in the work chart and to do what they are told. And most people who are doing what they are told feel safe, it feels reliable.

- Seth Godin

It’s not one of the enduring mysteries of all time. A motivated employee treats the customer well. A customer is happy so they’ll keep coming back, which pleases the shareholder. It’s just the way it works.

- Herb Kelleher

As we go forward, I hope we’re going to continue to use technology to make really big differences in how people live and work.

- Sergey Brin

Fortunately, problems are an everyday part of our life. Consider this: If there were no problems, most of us would be unemployed.

- Zig Ziglar

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