Notable Quotables

You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.

- Sam Rayburn

Giving should be entered into in just the same way as investing. Giving is investing.

- John D. Rockefeller

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

- Elon Musk

How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?

- Seth Godin

The saving of money is solely a matter of habit. It is literally true that man, through the Law of Habit, shapes his own personality. Through repetition, any act indulged in a few times becomes a habit, and the mind appears to be nothing more than a mass of motivating forces growing out of our daily habits. When once fixed in the mind a habit voluntarily impels one to action.

- Napoleon Hill

Everybody has a calling. And your real job in life is to figure out as soon as possible what that is, who you were meant to be, and to begin to honor that in the best way possible for yourself.

- Oprah Winfrey

Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.

- Benjamin Franklin

With no clear picture of how you wish your life to be, how on earth are you going to live it? What is your Primary Aim? Where is the script to make your dreams come true? what is the first step to take and how do you measure your progress? How far have you gone and how close are you to getting to your goals?

- Michael Gerber

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

- Winston Churchill

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

- Winston Churchill

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Every setback means you’re one step closer to seeing the dream come to pass.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Network effects businesses must start with especially small markets.

- Peter Thiel

The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.

- Warren Buffett

I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way.

- Steve Wozniak

I don’t like to look back, and I’m always worried about the next thing rather than resting on the laurels or the degradations of the last thing.

- Steve Martin

Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.

- Peter Thiel

You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.

- Seth Godin

God wants you to succeed. He created you to live abundantly.

- Joel Olsteen

A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.

- Elon Musk

Americans believe cotton is best, but we’ve invented new fabrics that will change your lifestyle.

- Tadashi Yanai

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

Today, we’ve begun to make the extraordinary historic films of the National Archives available to the world for the first time online. Students and researchers whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon.

- Sergey Brin

The principle is competing against yourself. It’s about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before.

- Steve Young

In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.

- Ben Horowitz

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

- Peter Thiel

I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.

- Bill Gates

It’s absolutely true we set out to expose Microsoft’s covert activities, I feel very good about what we did … Maybe our investigation organization may have done things unsavory, but it’s not illegal. We got the truth out.

- Larry Ellison

Every morning when I wake up, I make up my mind to solve as many problems before returning home.

- Aliko Dangote

In tennis, you strike a ball just after the rebound for the fastest return. It’s the same with investment.

- Masayoshi Son

People naturally follow those stronger than themselves.

- John Maxwell

You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision. In this one particular at least, business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.

- Peter Thiel

They don’t call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I’m no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.

- Larry Ellison

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

- Thomas Edison

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. You want to be focused on it.

- Steve Martin

We thought this [downturn] would last for two quarters, … Now we are saying that it will last for at least – at least ? three quarters.

- John Chambers

The lower and individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential.

- John Maxwell

Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people, working really hard and pleasing people, which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland, I’d do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled.

- Steve Martin

He had realized something while arcing in slow circles toward the earth—risks weren’t that scary once you took them. His.

- Timothy Ferriss

For the first time in a very long time, I believe the external factors are slowly starting to be more positive, … This is still a minority view, held by a minority of our customers, but we’ve seen early indications that the recovery could be gaining momentum.

- John Chambers

Remember that tomorrow when you are trying to get somebody to do something. If, for example, you don’t want your children to smoke, don’t preach at them, and don’t talk about what you want; but show them that cigarettes may keep them from making the basketball team or winning the hundred-yard dash.

- Dale Carnegie

In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

- Ben Horowitz

We saw strength across our core switching and routing businesses, as well as traction in our advanced technologies. The service provider and public sector segments, in particular, continue to be solid markets for our products.

- John Chambers

Great opportunities can be and have been created during tough economic times.

- Howard Schultz

Passion is everything. In fact, you’ve got to be borderline fanatical about what you do.

- Chris Gardner

If something is expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

- Bill Gates

Step up to the front, select what you want, create your plan, put your plan into action, and follow through with Persistence. Capitalist America will not rest.

- Napoleon Hill

Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.

- W. Clement Stone

American Dream – and it says that you should graduate from high school, graduate from college, get married, find a job with good benefits, have sex with your spouse two times per week, buy a home with a mortgage, get a pet, go on vacation two times per year, have two kids, invest in mutual funds and IRAs, recycle when possible, and aim to retire early in your mid-fifties to early sixties, if you are lucky. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s kind of hard to be passionate about that American Dream.

- Clay Clark

We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.

- Steve Ballmer

I’m trying to change the culture in New York City, that’s hard enough!

- Michael Bloomberg

The first step is to establish that something is possible, then probability will occur.

- Elon Musk

Do it, and then you will feel motivated to do it.

- Zig Ziglar

If we’re going to bring out the best in people, we, too, need to sow seeds of encouragement.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

What is school for? If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.

- Seth Godin

Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn’t really bother me.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

- Elon Musk

One of the most powerful forms of communication that affects a business is one over which you have little control (after the conversation has already begun): The communication from your existing customers to your potential customers. At CASHFLOW Technologies, Inc. we attribute a large part of our success to our customers telling other people about us. The power of this word-of-mouth advertising is immeasurable.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Small businesses don’t exist without the nucleus.

- Bryan Smith

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want that on my business card.

- Bill Gates

There is only one excuse for a speaker’s asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.

- Dale Carnegie

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

People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.

- Ben Horowitz

If it wasn’t a mystery, it would be easy. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.

- Seth Godin

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.

- Elon Musk

That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night1

- James C. Collins

Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It’s time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.

- Seth Godin

Mr. Ford’s most rapid strides became noticable from the time he became a personal friend of Thomas A. Edison, and you will begin to understand what the influence of one mind upon another can accomplish.

- Napoleon Hill

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake- you can’t learn anything from being perfect.

- Adam Osborne

The best way to be missed when you’re gone,Is to stand for something when you’re here.

- Seth Godin

God never said that we wouldn’t have unfair situations, that we wouldn’t experience loss. But He promised if we would stay in faith, He would restore everything that was stolen.

- Joel Olsteen

Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It’s not a popular position.

- Bill Gates

I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that’s a big deal. And if you’re going to be a leader – if you’re a leader and you’re the smartest guy in the world – in the room, you’ve got real problems.

- Jack Welch

I have no interest in going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. I’m just not that kind of dude.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

You can’t get too much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good.

- Jerry West

We used to think that everything started in the lab. Now we realize that everything spins off the consumer.

- Phil Knight

It takes the same effort to think small than to think big. But to think big frees you from the insignificant details.

- Jorge Paulo Lemann

I seldom read anything that is not of a factual nature because I want to invest my time wisely in the things that will improve my life. Don’t misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with reading purely for the joy of it. Novels have their place, but biographies of famous men and women contain information that can change lives.

- Zig Ziglar

If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

- Bill Gates

The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism.

- Peter Thiel

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.

- James C. Collins

We were looking to guide and help people who want to start small businesses.

- David Nilssen

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.

- James C. Collins

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

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