Notable Quotables

Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it’s cute but boring and expensive.

- P.J. O'Rourke

Of course, the challenge of being the initiator is that you’ll be wrong. You’ll pick the wrong thing, you’ll waste time, you’ll be blamed. This is why being an initiator is valuable. Most people shy away from the challenge. They’ve been too abused, they’re too fearful, they hold back, they’re happy to let someone else take the heat. Initiative is scarce. Hence valuable. Ditch digging is not scarce. It’s not hard at all to find manual labor at minimum wage, which is precisely why manual labor gets paid minimum wage. It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.

- Seth Godin

I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States.

- Stephen Wynn

I very much believe that creating a sense of fun and keeping up everyone’s energy level is part of my job description. – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands

- David Novak

Insulation prevents you from making the change and finding the understanding you set out to achieve in the first place.

- Seth Godin

If something is worth doing, it is worth doing right. I take that one step further. You shouldn’t do anything unless you do it right.

- George Foreman

I actually do think you’re seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that’s a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what’s going on with them.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one.

- Joel Olsteen

Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: ‘I may be wrong. Let’s examine the facts.

- Dale Carnegie

He was contradicting everything he’d taught us about not running sick and making it worse. I knew it was just to make me acknowledge that his word was law, no matter how arbitrary. But that didn’t make it any easier to take. I was so mad I ran a personal record.

- Phil Knight

In my opinion, education is the finest gift an individual can give a young person.

- Donald Bren

The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist.

- Zig Ziglar

It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.

- Ben Horowitz

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

- Henry Ford

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society.

- Joel Olsteen

I come back to the same thing: We’ve got the greatest pipeline in the company’s history in the next 12 months, and we’ve had the most amazing financial results possible over the last five years, and we’re predicting being back at double-digit revenue growth in fiscal year ’06.

- Steve Ballmer

Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.

- Sam Walton

Always have something to say. The man who has something to say and who is known never to speak unless he has, is sure to be listened to.

- Dale Carnegie

Communications and the exchange of value – they’re both foundational, essential things to our civilization. When you simplify those, when you get down to the essence, you fix so many things.

- Jack Dorsey

F-E-A-R has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.’ The choice is yours.

- Zig Ziglar

I’d say it’s been my biggest problem of my life…it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.

- Walt Disney

My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.

- Jack Dorsey

…People have lived before you. You’re not the first person to dream big, so you’d be wise to study what others have learned first and then build you actions on the backs of their lessons.

- Gary Keller

When I hire someone, I try to get beneath the surface and go deep. The first question I ask is, Has this person demonstrated any leadership potential? I ask for specifics and probe carefully to find out exactly what that person contributed. After all, success has many fathers.’ I also look for enthusiasm, people who lean forward in their chairs, who get up on their haunches a little but when they talk about what they’ve done. I like to see the passion and the excitement because that’s what will allow someone to inspire others. The next thing I look for is an avid learners, someone who is curious, who has an ability to make connections, to pick up on trends, and to apply what’s going on in the rest of the world to his or her business career. You obviously need smart people with a proven track record, but the real stars are passionate about what they do and are avid learners. Those two things make people continually raise the bar on performance.

- David Novak

Social and digital media is a bullet train, and that bullet train is not coming home.

- Howard Schultz

People who couldn’t fit into this informal and entreprenual environment left or were asked to leave. I cut my losses quickly on bad hires that didn’t perform.

- Jack Welch

I’ve always believed that there are funny people everywhere, but they’re just not comedians. In fact, some of my best comedic inspirations were not professional entertainers.

- Steve Martin

I am concerned about any attrition in customer traffic at Starbucks, but I don’t want to use the economy, commodity prices or consumer confidence as an excuse. We must maintain a value proposition to our customers as well as differentiate the Starbucks Experience. That is the key.

- Howard Schultz

Getting over the war was biggest adversity I have ever faced.

- Jack Nadel

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

- Albert Schweitzer

Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.

- Elon Musk

I never hid my thoughts or feelings. During a business meeting I could get so emotionally charged and involved that I’d stammer out what others might consider to be outrageous things like, My six year old could do better than that! Or Don’t Walter Cronkite me!

- Solutions

So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.

- Thomas Edison

Control has to be by feedback from the work done. The work itself has to provide the information. If it has to be checked all the time, there is no control.

- Peter Drucker

His strategy would be to subjugate one part of the battlefield, consolidate his forces, then move briskly on to the next conquest. His victory over the Cleveland refiners would be the first but alos the most controversial compaign of his career.

- Ron Chernow

The profile of homebuyers in Hong Kong is becoming more diverse and a wider range of marketing channels is thus needed to promote the Group’s Hong Kong property projects.

- Lee Shau Kee

Opportunity does not knock, it presents itself when you beat down the door.

- Kyle Chandler

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

- Elon Musk

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

- Peter Drucker

In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.

- Dale Carnegie

Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.

- Ben Horowitz

When we recognize the fraud for what it is, we feel incredibly stupid. Something more than our bank accounts is damaged—our egos are damaged. As a result, it’s almost impossible for the marketer to regain our trust.

- Seth Godin

It means the ability to go, go, go – to thrive on action and relish change. People with positive energy are generally extroverted and optimistic. They make conversation and friends easily. They start the day with enthusiasm and usually end it that way too, rarely seeming to tire in the middle. They don’t complain about working hard: they love to work. They also love to play. People with positive energy just love life.

- Jack Welch

A business that looks orderly says to your customer that your people know what they’re doing.

- Michael Gerber

Marketing is every bit of contact your company has with anyone in the outside world. Every bit of contact. That means a lot of marketing opportunities. It does not mean investing a lot of money.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have it depends solely on what you think.

- Dale Carnegie

The higher the level of leadership people want to reach, the greater the sacrifices they will have to make?

- John Maxwell

A half-billion-dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid-2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was possible, and Tesla played it perfectly.

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I once dieted so religiously I quit eating in church.

- Zig Ziglar

The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.

- Peter Drucker

What you receive is directly connected to what you believe.

- Joel Olsteen

They (the competition) need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Wal-Mart (DJC) on something like toothpaste (DJ Prices). That’s not what the customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out on the floor and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and ring that cash register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Wal-Mart tries to duplicate – and we try awfully hard – we can’t really do it.

- Sam Walton

Rockefeller never clarified why he dropped out of high school around May 1855, just 2 months shy of commencement, excercises on July 16…

- Ron Chernow

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

- Elon Musk

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

Approach each customer with the idea of helping them solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.

- Brian Tracy

When nobody else celebrates you, learn to celebrate yourself. When nobody else compliments you, then compliment yourself. It’s not up to other people to keep you encouraged. It’s up to you. Encouragement should come from the inside.

- Joel Olsteen

One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness upon the part of the leader to do more than he requires of his followers.

- Napoleon Hill

When evaluating the results, we should not overlook the fact that there was, in some cases, very weak growth in Europe, Russia, and South America. There were also significant exchange rate fluctuations. In addition, the mild winter at the end of 2014 had a negative impact on the winter tire business in Europe. The driving force behind the sales development once again came from China and North America. In light of this, it is remarkable that profit after taxes of just under €2.4 billion or €11.88 per share could be achieved.

- Elmar Degenhart

Once you go from 10 people to 100, you already don’t know who everyone is. So at that stage you might as well keep growing, to get the advantages of scale.

- Sergey Brin

The great majority of people are “wandering generalities” rather than “meaningful specifics”. The fact is that you can’t bit a target that you can’t see. If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else. You have to have goals.

- Zig Ziglar

People want to watch whatever video they want to watch whenever they want to watch. If you provision your Internet infrastructure adequately, you can do that.

- Bill Gates

Let’s make it easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.

- Jack Dorsey

If you don’t let people flourish in their jobs, why are they going to stay?

- Joel Olsteen

If the merit of the idea is strong, it spreads really quickly no matter who you are or where you are from.

- Jack Dorsey

Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt.

- Seth Godin

In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

- Harry Truman

Cisco Systems Capital will be investing in companies working on networking technology.

- John Chambers

Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.

- Peter Drucker

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

- Henry Ford

I don’t want to just preach to the church. I feel like I have a broader message.

- Joel Olsteen

If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

- Bill Gates

The three short years I spent at Harvard, where I lived with excellent people, taught me not only that I must know how to choose my partners but also that choosing excellent partners is a skill you can learn. Obviously, when you spend time with the best, you learn how to choose among them.

- Jorge Paulo Lemann

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

- Bill Gates

You’re got to worry about what’s coming up to stay ahead of the curve…

- Phil Knight

It’s important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable.

- Sara Blakely

There is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.

- Winston Churchill

At an end your rule is, and not short enought it was!

- Yoda

As much as I love crisp, clean whites, there’s always a time for rich but balanced Chardonnays with oak, especially at Thanksgiving.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Clear your mind must be, if you are to find the villains behind this plot.

- Yoda

A startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

- Peter Thiel

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