The Lack of Candor is the biggest and deepest darkest secrets of business…People might not have agree with me on every issue, and I may not have been right all the time, but they always knew they were getting it straight and honest.
- Jack Welch
Notable Quotables
I’m very careful about saying who would and wouldn’t go to heaven. I don’t know.
- Joel Olsteen
There is no more important economic policy issue today than helping our nation remain the global innovation leader. To do this, our leadership must focus on an aggressive agenda to support math and science education, patent litigation reform, healthcare information technology, and research and development. We thank President Bush for his leadership and urge all members of Congress to address these issues in a comprehensive fashion to get the job done.
- John Chambers
Newport Center has become a Mediterranean town. The climate here is the same as the Mediterranean’s, and so is the architecture. This center exudes a radiance, an energy. It will become a special way of life for everyone.
- Donald Bren
When I finally retire, I just want to go away so no one has to listen to me.
- Steve Martin
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.
- Jeff Bezos
Every setback means you’re one step closer to seeing the dream come to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like 10 or 20 years from now.
- Peter Thiel
I’ve never preached one sermon on money, on just finances. I want to stay away from it.
- Joel Olsteen
Personal initiative is the power that inspires the completion of that which one begins. It is the power that starts all action. No person is free until he learns to do his own thinking and gains the courage to act on his own.
- Napoleon Hill
Try to build bridges of understanding. Don’t build higher barriers of misunderstanding.
- Dale Carnegie
What most people want in a leader is something that’s very difficult to find: we want someone who listens…The secret, Reagan’s secret, is to listen, to value what you hear, and then to make a decision even if it contradicts the very people you are listening to. Reagan impressed his advisers, his adversaries, and his voters by actively listening. People want to be sure you hear what they said – they’re less focused on whether or not you do what they said.
- Seth Godin
Stop whining, start hustling.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Positional leaders ignore the fact that every person has hopes, dreams, desires, and goals of his own. And leaders must bring their vision and the aspirations of the people they lead together in a way that benefits everyone.”
- John C. Maxwell
Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
- Colin Powell
Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.
- John C. Maxwell
Character is to man what carbon is to steel.
- Napoleon Hill
Certainly there are times in all of our lives when bad things happen, or things don’t turn out as we had hoped. But that’s when we we must a decision that we’re going to be happy inspite of our circumstances.
- Joel Olsteen
My Golden Rule of Networking is simple: Don’t keep score.
- Harvey Mackay
The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
- Peter Thiel
If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
- Bill Gates
Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
- Bill Gates
How fortunate it was for the world that when these great trials came upon it there was a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave.
- Winston Churchill
Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.
- William Feather
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution. It just needs clarity.
- Ben Horowitz
It’s hard to make a living when you are in school…
- Michael Dell
No matter how senior you get in an organization, no matter how well you’re perceived to be doing, your job is never done. Every day, you get up and the world is changing; your customers are expecting more from you. Your competitors are putting pressure on you by doing more and trying to beat you here and beat you there.
- Abigail Johnson
Service is the key to everything in life.
- Russell Simmons
Strip malls are history.
- Jeff Bezos
If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.
- Elon Musk
When commercializing disruptive technologies, they found or developed new markets that valued the attributes of the disruptive products, rather than search for a technological breakthrough so that the disruptive product could compete as a sustaining technology in mainstream markets.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Getting things done in this country, if you want to build something, if you want to start a company, it’s getting to be virtually impossible with all of the bureaucracy and all of the approvals.
- Donald Trump
If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.
- Dave Ramsey
We got to know a lot of investors and know what they like and don’t like. Through many co-investments opportunities, we have built trust among these investors. So when it came to investing in Xiaomi, things were a lot easier.
- Lei Jun
There has never been a statue erected in honor of a critic.
- Zig Ziglar
The elevator to success is not running, you must climb the stairs.
- Zig Ziglar
This is just going to be a great event and we have an outstanding speaker.
- Jack Taylor
If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.
- Peter Thiel
I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life.
- Steve Ballmer
Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve.
- Dale Carnegie
All I want is compliance with my wishes, after reasonable discussion.
- Winston Churchill
Too often, sales reps simply regurgitate their presentations and expect to land the sale. It doesn’t work.
- Harvey Mackay
Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.
- Seth Godin
Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.
- Napoleon Hill
What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.
- Bill Gates
I’m not an actor who appears on the stage and gives people advice on how to live or what to do and entertains them. It is not my specialty.
- Vagit Alekperov
The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima – so it’s more visible.
- Bill Gates
It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.
- Warren Buffett
Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today. Go another mile!
- Og Mandino
People who add value to others do so intentionally. I say that because to add value, leaders must give of themselves, and that rarely occurs by accident.
- John C. Maxwell
Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.
- Steve Wozniak
Marketing knits the whole organization together.
- Phil Knight
Key to helping poor is to not be poor.
- Abraham Lincoln
“Everyone will think it’s stupid!””Everyone says it’s impossible.”Guess what? Everyone works in the balloon factory and everyone is wrong.
- Seth Godin
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
- Albert Einstein
If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.
- Peter Thiel
We beat our expectations in the run up to Christmas and this time last year we had particularly high stock levels leading to a bigger clearance.
- Simon Wolfson
I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.
- Jeff Bezos
On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We’ve got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers – and there could be a lot of them – will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.
- Howard Schultz
I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.
- Phil Knight
A leader once convinced a particular action is the right one, must have the determination to stick with it and be undaunted when the going gets rough.
- Ronald Reagan
Doing the Unrealistic Is Easier Than Doing the Realistic
- Timothy Ferriss
Twitter in 2000 was something that was fun to play with but something I put on the shelf to play with for another day. And that day was 2006.
- Jack Dorsey
You need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
It’s unconscionable that cancer patients get the wrong diagnosis 30 percent of the time and that it takes so long to treat them with appropriate drugs for their cancer.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.
- John C. Maxwell
On an opponent:”He loves the working man. He loves to see him work.
- Winston Churchill
With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain market share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device. But a lot of those users are frustrated. They can’t type. They can’t create documents.
- Bill Gates
He listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.
- Ron Chernow
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
- Steve Jobs
In Russia, or anywhere, people don’t like rich people. Yeah, OK, I have money, but the question is how I use it. It’s not easy, believe me; it’s not easy.
- Viktor Vekselberg
Backed by our conviction, we remain committed to investing wholeheartedly to improve the people’s living conditions, regardless of all uncertainties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.
- Jack Canfield
There is no such thing as a good tax.
- Winston Churchill
If I had to single out one element in my life that has made difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.
- Sam Walton
By getting your customers to agree with you in small steps along the way, you have a better chance of reaching agreement when it’s time to do business.
- Harvey Mackay
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
Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.
- Peter Drucker
You cannot consistently perform in a manner which is inconsistent with the way you see yourself.
- Zig Ziglar
A lovely nook of forest scenery, or a grand rock, like a beautiful woman, depends for much of its attractiveness upon the attendance sense of freedom from whatever is low; upon a sense of purity and of romance.
- P.T. Barnum
Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.
- Peter Thiel
Checks should be endorsed immediately: FOR DEPOSIT ONLY.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.
- Oprah Winfrey
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
- Winston Churchill
I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
- Elon Musk
Don’t Hire People Like Yourself.
- Forrest Ray
A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.
- Ralph Lauren
I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.
- Elon Musk
Thinking back to old-time computer programming in the days before programming languages supported internationalization, we used to have to “internationalize” our code. We called this internationalization process “I18N” for short (localization was L10N), which meant I followed by eighteen letters followed by N.
- Ben Horowitz
The flexibility of Hong Kong businessmen should soon twist a way to success again.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.
- Reid Hoffman
There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.
- Henry Ford
It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you’re not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it’s actually space that’s moving.
- Elon Musk
Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult.
- Og Mandino
I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.
- Walt Disney
There will be no government that will be against business, so you can go ahead and invest.
- Aliko Dangote
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s always good to be underestimated.
- Donald Trump
What we know about the destination resort business is clearly established. But it’s all about one thing, and one thing only. All of the razzmatazz and jazz we hear about facilities and everything else doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s customer experience that determines the longevity and endurance of these enterprises.
- Stephen Wynn
