If a person makes a statement that you think is wrong—yes, even that you know is wrong—isn’t it better to begin by saying: Well, now, look. I thought otherwise, but I may be wrong. I frequently am. And if I am wrong, I want to be put right. Let’s examine the facts.” There’s magic, positive magic, in such phrases as: I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let’s examine the facts.
- Dale Carnegie
Notable Quotables
Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.
- Bill Gates
Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money, non-monopolists can’t.
- Peter Thiel
You learn more in failure than you ever do in success.
- Jay-Z
Vision without execution is just hallucination.
- Thomas Edison
The ‘morality of compromise’ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.
- Andrew Carnegie
Separate performance from people.
- David Robinson
Children astound me with their inquisitive minds. The world is wide and mysterious to them, and as they piece together the puzzle of life, they ask ‘Why?’ ceaselessly.
- John C. Maxwell
Satisfied, loyal and repeat customers are at the heart of Walmart’s spectacular profit margins, and those customers are loyal to us because our associates treat them better than salespeople in other stores do. So, in the whole Wal-Mart scheme of things, the most important contact ever made is between the associated in the store and the customer. I didn’t catch on to that idea for quite a while. In fact, the biggest single regret in my whole business career is that we didn’t include our associates in the initial, managers-only profit-sharing plan when we took the company public in 1970. But there was nobody around preaching that philosophy in those days, and I guess I was just too worried about my own debt, and in too big a hurry to get somewhere fast. Today, some of our company’s critics would like everybody to believe we started our profit-sharing program and other benefits merely as away to stave off union organizing.
- Sam Walton
We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it.
- James C. Collins
You cannot expect victory and plan for defeat.
- Joel Olsteen
My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.
- Jerry Seinfeld
My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It’s a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we’ve come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.
- Larry Page
Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.
- Zig Ziglar
The guerrilla is obsessed with benefits. Whenever offering a product or service, she focuses on how it will benefit the consumer and builds everything—the product, the delivery, the marketing—around that benefit.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
Magnesium and calcium are easiest to consume in pill form, and 500 milligrams of magnesium taken prior to bed will also improve sleep.
- Timothy Ferriss
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
- Warren Buffett
You’ve got to embrace what you don’t know.
- Sara Blakely
I have found from costly experience that it is much easier to analyze the facts after writing them down. In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us reach a sensible decision. As Charles Kettering puts it: A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
- Dale Carnegie
Just like Mark Snider told the Board of Elections within a couple hours of when he first became aware of it… first of all, Mike and I didn’t even know anything about this till March 16, … Second of all, nobody benefited from this in any way, shape or form whatsoever.
- Michael Ward
China has set its cultural industries as pillar industries.
- Wang Jianlin
I don’t feel under-taxed in any way at all.
- Jack Welch
Focus on your people – Without employees and customers, your’re going nowwhere.
- David Green
People’s favorite topic is themselves.
- Dale Carnegie
It is my practice to try to understand how valuable something is by trying to imagine myself without it.
- Herb Kelleher
What we need to do is always lean into the future, when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.
- Jeff Bezos
I think that the act of teaching is the most gratifying and rewarding of all human endeavors.
- David Novak
Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
I believe in God, family, and McDonald’s. And in the office, that order is reversed.
- Ray Kroc
I think I will always have a connection to young people, to try to bring their voices to the polls, bring their voices wherever they can make a difference.
- Russell Simmons
And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.
- Richard Branson
The Real ReasonNew College Grads Can’t Get Hired shocked many when it reported, The Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College finds that more than 60% of employers say applicants lack communication and interpersonal skills
- Martha C. White
Everybody starts with creating or acquiring certain property in order to create the material to work with. When we started our business, we thought first of all about development, how to grow, and we managed to do this, even with all the difficulties and all the difficult rules that were implemented in Russia at that time.
- Vladimir Potanin
China remains a market with unprecedented potential.
- Cheng Yu-tung
You’re either remarkable or invisible.
- Seth Godin
Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.
- William Feather
The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.
- Bill Gates
As you begin changing your thinking, start immediately to change your behavior. Begin to act the part of the person you would like to become. Take action on your behavior. Too many people want to feel, then take action. This never works.
- John C. Maxwell
China is likely to sustain its pace of economic growth for the next decade.
- Cheng Yu-tung
We intend to focus all our attentions in the coming years on three core growth forces. These are: 1. The massive expansion of our considerable software expertise. After all, in our eyes, software is the “new wheel” of mankind and our industry. Processes with regard to mobility are becoming increasingly complex and more strongly interconnected. These processes need to be controlled and managed reliably, requiring ever greater amounts of software. In the future, practically nothing will move without software. 2. In the fields of technology relevant for us, we want to be regarded as a pioneering and leading technology partner – especially by our customers. 3. Finally, and above all, with our pioneering corporate culture we want to be the preferred employer for people who want to fully develop and expand their skills and abilities with us and make rapid progress.” “Continental has had a good start into 2015, thus confirming our expectations for the entire year.
- Elmar Degenhart
The question isn’t ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?
- Mark Zuckerberg
Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.
- Ben Horowitz
Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can’t be too worried about what they’re told at their country clubs.
- Rupert Murdoch
should go out each day expecting good things, anticipating God’s blessings and favor. God has planned all of your days for good, not evil.
- Joel Olsteen
Potential means that you haven’t done it yet.
- David Novak
Everyone is going to binge on a diet, for instance, so plan for it, schedule it, and contain the damage.
- Timothy Ferriss
I have this system where if I buy three or four new things, I give away three or four things. Sometimes, it’s a very painful system, but shopping is even better when you know that someone else who needs it will be getting. Keep the clothing karma going, I say.
- Sara Blakely
The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
- Jim Collins
I believe that those who stay in faith are highly favored. You need to prepare for an exceeding, abundant, above-and-beyond life; a life where people go out of their way for no reason to be good to you; a life where you get promoted even though you weren’t the most qualified; a life where you find yourself in the right place at the right time.
- Joel Olsteen
The economy is like a machine.
- Ray Dalio
The successful business executive can handle challenges and solve problems at a remarkable clip.
- Zig Ziglar
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
- Warren Buffett
Don’t ally your personal interests with the development of the company.
- Wang Jianlin
We have an average household net worth of $3.7 million. Of course, some of our cohorts have accumulated much more. Nearly 6 percent have a net worth of over $10 million. Again, these people skew our average upward. The typical (median, or 50th percentile) millionaire household has a net worth of $1.6 million.
- Thomas J Stanley
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you’re going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don’t work.
- Seth Godin
I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.
- Sam Walton
DAY FOURTEEN I DECLARE that I will use my words to bless people. I will speak favor and victory over my family, friends, and loved ones. I will help call out their seeds of greatness by telling them I’m proud of you, I love you, you are amazing, you are talented, you are beautiful, you will do great things in life.” This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
[On someone with a new idea.] The first thing is to draw it out, program it, play with it and get other people playing with it so you can get feedback right away… Once you get that feedback you know if it’s something you should pursue and give more of your attention to, or if it’s something you should put on the shelf for another da
- Jack Dorsey
A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.
- John Shedd
All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.
- Brian Tracy
True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- Helen Keller
Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.
- Winston Churchill
I did not like the way I looked in a pair of white pants.
- Sara Blakely
I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.
- Steve Martin
The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
- Bill Gates
Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining – it bores everybody else, does you no good, and doesn’t solve any problems.
- Zig Ziglar
The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must not look too good nor talk too wise.
- Dale Carnegie
Gas consumption is growing everywhere.
- Vagit Alekperov
I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.
- Steve Martin
Opening new stores outside of Japan is important, but training our employees is even more important.
- Tadashi Yanai
I absolutely don’t have $20 billion. But I’d love to, right?
- Jack Ma
If you don’t have a competitive advantage — don’t compete.
- Jack Welch
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
It may look impossible, but God can do the impossible. Just because you don’t see anything happening doesn’t mean God is not working.
- Joel Olsteen
In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.
- Peter Thiel
I love being a dad. I just love it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Ultimately you want to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind
- Sergey Brin
The growth of an enterprise is no different from the self-improvement of human beings. It is a step-by-step procedure and an ever-lasting course of improvement, which requires staying in line with the era and taking up social responsibility.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I attract a crowd, not because I’m an extrovert or I’m over the top or I’m oozing with charisma. It’s because I care.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
At your next sales meeting with 20 people, three will take home the money of 17 others. Is it luck, hard work and a great attitude? Or it is persuasive skill – understanding the transactional dynamics of the sales process?
- Jerry Vass
The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.
- Elon Musk
There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. An effective way to enforce this requirement is by withholding new employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training program.
- Andrew Grove
Every morning when I wake up, I make up my mind to solve as many problems before returning home.
- Aliko Dangote
I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
- Elon Musk
The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.
- Peter Thiel
Being excellent is hard. So when you have something hard to do, remember you are being excellent. Do you want to be remembered for being good or great?
- Lee Cockerell
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
- Steve Wozniak
After Scour, I started a company called Red Swoosh. The idea was to take those litigants who sued us for a huge amount of money and turn them into customers with the same technology. I wanted to get them to pay me. It was a revenge business.
- Travis Kalanick
In those days he was wiser than he is now, he used to frequently take my advice.
- Winston Churchill
Leadership is not dictatorship
- Tony Hsieh
A key component of the Soft Sell is asking questions that require the Buyer to think and reach inside for the answer so as to reveal needs the Seller can fulfill with a product or service.
- Jerry Vass
Nothing in life has happened to you. It’s happened for you. Every disappointment. Every wrong. Even every closed door has helped make you into who you are.
- Joel Olsteen
Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn’t.
- Ben Horowitz
I chose America as my home because I value freedom and democracy, civil liberties and an open society.
- George Soros
We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.
- Winston Churchill
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
The secret to modern life is finding the measure in time management. I have two kids, career and I travel, and I don’t think my life is any different than most couples. The most valuable commodity now for many people is time and how to parcel that out.
- Hugh Jackman
The great news is that God knows everything about you, both good and bad, and He still loves you and values you unconditionally. God does not always approve of our behavior. He is not pleased when we go against his will, and when we do, we always suffer the consequences and have to work with Him to correct our thoughts, words, actions, or attitudes. And while you should work to improve in the areas where you fall short, nothing you do will ever cause God to love you less…or more. His love is a constant you can depend on.
- Joel Olsteen
A man may be poor; he may have nothing at all except his labour to sell; he may be a manual worker for a weekly wage, but in a free commonwealth he must enjoy as good a right as any lord, or prelate, or capitalist in the country to the integrity of his own political convictions.
- Winston Churchill
