Notable Quotables

Blacksmiths sometimes twist a rope tight around the nose of a horse, and by thus inflicting a little pain they distract his attention from the shoeing process. One way to get air out of a glass is to pour in water. Be Absorbed by Your Subject.

- Dale Carnegie

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

- Winston Churchill

If you talk about Cabernet and Merlot-based value between $10 and $25, I will tell you that Bordeaux is the best value in the world.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

A valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominating a small market.

- Peter Thiel

Ultimately, broadcasters and advertisers have to change the way they do business or they run the risk of linear TV becoming obsolete.

- Charles Ergen

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ’cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

- Bill Gates

Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals. Management.

- Peter Drucker

Men like a ref decision because they just want to get back to the game.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Indeed, the real question is not, Why greatness?” but What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.

- James C. Collins

No business can stay in business without customers. How you treat – or mistreat – them determines how long your doors stay open.

- Harvey Mackay

I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.

- Dale Carnegie

I always saw myself wanting to do something deemed successful and good at the same time.

- Howard Schultz

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

- Winston Churchill

Most men go to their graves with their dreams still inside them.

- Zig Ziglar

There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.

- Peter Thiel

Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.

- Jeff Bezos

Much like us, our customers are rigorously working to improve their profitability and capacity for innovation. For us, this means doing everything possible when it comes to efficiency, effectiveness, and innovations – and all that on the basis of the highest quality. After all, quality creates trust – and trust creates orders. In short, we need to constantly become better and better at the high level we are already operating at.

- Elmar Degenhart

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

There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.

- Norman Vincent Peale

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

- Winston Churchill

In poor countries, we still need better ways to measure the effectiveness of the many government workers providing health services. They are the crucial link bringing tools such as vaccines and education to the people who need them most. How well trained are they? Are they showing up to work?

- Bill Gates

The flexibility of Hong Kong businessmen should soon twist a way to success again.

- Cheng Yu-tung

You can dramatize your ideas in business or in any other aspect of your life. It’s easy.

- Dale Carnegie

I believe that God’s dream is that we be successful in our careers, and that we be able to send our kids to college. I don’t mean that everyone is going to be rich, and I preach a lot on blooming where you’re planted. But I don’t have the mindset that money is a bad thing.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Lee Shau Kee

Everybody is going to have their critics. It’s easy to get discouraged in life.

- Joel Olsteen

You need to live every day like it could be your last.

- Joel Olsteen

Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.

- Jeff Bezos

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

- Dale Carnegie

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives.

- Jeff Bezos

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, an Inner Temple lawyer, now become a seditious fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

- Winston Churchill

Pay attention to those employees who respectfully ask why. They are demonstrating an interest in their jobs and exhibiting a curiosity that could eventually translate into leadership ability.

- Harvey Mackay

Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.

- Henry Ford

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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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

Successful storytelling builds brand equity, and businesses with high brand equity don’t need to draw as much attention to themselves and their achievements as those that are still establishing their value to the customer.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.

- Ben Horowitz

The epidemic So many people are frozen in the face of uncertainty and paralyzed at the thought of shipping work that matters that one might think that the fear is hardwired into us. It is. Scientists can identify precisely where your lizard brain lives. This is your prehistoric early brain, the same brain that’s in the lizard or the deer. Filled with fear, intent on reproduction. Steven Pressfield gives the voice of the lizard brain a name: he calls it the resistance. And the resistance is talking to you as you read this, urging you to compromise, to not be an troublemaker, to avoid rash moves. For many of us, the resistance is always chattering away, frequently sabotaging our best opportunities and ruining our best chance to do great work. Naming it helps you befriend it, and befriending it helps you ignore it.

- Seth Godin

As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise – security, quality and worms.

- Ben Horowitz

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

- Bill Gates

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

- Dale Carnegie

The formula for handling Inherent Objections: 1. Isolate the Objection 2. Minimize the Objection 3. Offset the Objection with Benefits

- Jerry Vass

I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing.

- Seth Godin

I don’t want people in China to have deep pockets but shallow minds.

- Jack Ma

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

- Peter Thiel

We believe our growth rate indicates that Cisco continues to gain market share against our traditional competitors in most product sectors.

- John Chambers

If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.

- Peter Thiel

That was a great day in my life! Your time is too valuable to worry about pleasing everyone else or making them happy. I know people who spend more time worrying about what others think about them than they do focusing on their own dreams and goals. You’ve got to get free from that.

- Joel Olsteen

A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see and who sees before others see.

- Leroy Eimes

If you are going to run a successful business you are going to have to be committed to your customers 100% of the time. If customers consistently tell you that they don’t like a certain product or service you offer or an employee that you have working for you, you must be willing to act based upon their feedback if you find it to be factual.

- Clay Clark

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.

- Winston Churchill

We were old sinners – but when we came to Christ we are not sinners anymore.

- Joel Olsteen

Why does a 67-year-old guy who got his start running an athletic shoe company think he can enter a field famous for gobbling up fortunes.

- Phil Knight

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

- John C. Maxwell

The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.

- Jim Rohn

I don’t know why you should be proud of something. It doesn’t make you any better or worse. You are what you are.

- Michael Bloomberg

Hong Kong has gone through many ups and downs in the past. Unavoidably, one needs to go through the lowest point before reaching the peak again.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed…You only have to be right once…I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all.

- Mark Cuban

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

- Napoleon Hill

Positive thinking is more than just a tagline. It changes the way we behave. And I firmly believe that when I am positive, it not only makes me better, but it also makes those around me better.

- Harvey Mackay

My mission is not to forbid French art. If the quality is there, I buy; if the quality isn’t there, I don’t.

- Francois Pinault

If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.

- Sun Tzu

I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.

- Steve Martin

You don’t have to choose between your business and your life. Rather, if you do it right, you get your business and your life. In fact, we strongly believe that the only way to build a truly scalable business is by radically reducing its reliance on you, the owner, and supporting that rapid growth through systems, team and internal business controls.

- Jeff Hoffman

Too often, we have tended to fall into a trap of creating plain hamburgers.

- Tadashi Yanai

Every day were saying, ‘How can we keep this customer happy?’ How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don’t, somebody else will.

- Bill Gates

Everyone has the potential to become an encourager. You don’t have to be rich. You don’t have to be a genius. You don’t have to have it all together. All you have to do is care about people and initiate.

- John C. Maxwell

You have to respect your parents. They are giving you an at-bat. If you’re an entrepreneur and go into the family business, you want to grow fast. Patience is important. But respect the other party… My dad and I pulled it off because we really respect each other.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

- Bill Gates

I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he’s got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.

- Bill Gates

For those already successful, money can become a controlling factor in life and make you a slave to it. One way to avoid that – Philanthropy.

- Lee Shau Kee

The problems forced us to take a hard look at what we were doing, what was going wrong, what we were good at, and where we wanted to go.

- Phil Knight

I am not a person who pursues luxury. I am not like those people who, once they have money, compulsively squander it or show it off.

- Wang Jianlin

I don’t have any opinions about Russians. There are celebrity persons in each country. Different people do different things.

- Alexei Mordashov

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

- Socrates

There is never a bad time to start a business – unless you want to start a mediocre one.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet – how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

- Jeff Bezos

We’d like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers.

- Seth Godin

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

- Larry Page

We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective.

- Peter Thiel

When I was 17 or 18 I wanted to become a wine expert, and my parents wouldn’t let me drink. So I was devastated. All I could do was read, and I read and I read. And I’d read something like, you know, ‘Subtle hints of cassis.’

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Nobody’s ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there’s some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.

- Richard Branson

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

- Peter Drucker

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

- John F. Kennedy

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.

- Thomas Edison

General and undifferentiated pitches don’t say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others.

- Peter Thiel

Diversification does not mean that we have lost confidence in the long term prospects of the property market. Just the contrary is true.One year after the hand-over of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, the people in Hong Kong and around the world have witnessed the successful implementation of the ‘One Country, Two System.’

- Cheng Yu-tung

People development should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on.

- Jack Welch

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