But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.
- Jeff Bezos
Notable Quotables
I was working with stem cells as part of a NASA programme. We realised that the science of stem-cell proliferation was also fundamental to cancer cells when cancer enters the phase of metastasis.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
I’m not gonna give up, shut up, or let up… as a matter of fact, I’m just getting warmed up.
- Zig Ziglar
Learn from the past, but don’t live there. Build on what you know so that you don’t repeat mistakes. Resolve to learn something new every day. Because every 24 hours, you have the opportunity to have the best day of your company’s life.
- Harvey Mackay
Use money to make money. Save your ‘first bucket of gold.’ or small fortune – but then use it for investments. Don’t just park money in the bank.
- Lee Shau Kee
Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want.
- Timothy Ferriss
Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
- Peter Thiel
Somehow over the years people have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was… just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. But…it was an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since [1945]…. And like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.
- James C. Collins
Hard feelings pass. Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.
- Timothy Ferriss
If we can put a man on the moon, we can make pantyhose comfortable.
- Sara Blakely
Haiti should remind us all that there is an immediate need to invest in and promote long-term development projects that are sustainable, scalable, and proven to work.
- Bill Gates
SpaceX has the potential of saving the U.S. government $1 billion a year. We are opposed to creating an entrenched monopoly with no realistic means for anyone to compete.
- Elon Musk
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
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
Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that’s somewhat correct.
- Larry Page
We can’t wait for Washington. Business leaders are going to have to galvanize their own constituencies and do everything they can to demonstrate confidence in the economy, and I think that can be contagious.
- Howard Schultz
If you don’t cut off negative information it will depress you. Step out of the natural and say, This may be impossible with men, but I know with God all things are possible.
- Joel Olsteen
He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.
- Winston Churchill
Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.
- Dale Carnegie
The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn’t have that kind of personality, and it’s a terrifying thing to say.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I’m blessed to be a blessing to someone else.
- Joel Olsteen
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
- Peter Drucker
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
- William Arthur Ward
If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.
- Zig Ziglar
My favorite museums are things like the Frick Museum in New York and the Huntington Hartford in Pasadena where it’s someone’s home that you walk through.
- Larry Ellison
Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees.
- Putting the Service-Profit Chain To Work - Ja
They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.
- Thomas Edison
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
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
Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.
- Peter Thiel
All your ideas may be solid or even good .. But you have to Actually EXECUTE on them for them to matter.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Everybody is going to have their critics. It’s easy to get discouraged in life.
- Joel Olsteen
You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.
- Zig Ziglar
My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
- Henry Ford
I enjoy the hunt much more than the ‘good life’ after the victory.
- Carl Icahn
I like having the digital camera on my smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take real pictures.
- Jeff Bezos
A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.
- Joel Olsteen
Half the battle is selling music, not singing it. It’s the image, not what you sing.
- Rod Stewart
Surround yourself with people who want the best for you and the people you love!
- Zig Ziglar
Ow, ow, OW! On my ear you are!
- Yoda
The foundation of success in life is good health: that is the substratum fortune, it is also the basis of happiness. A person cannot accumulate a fortune very well when he is sick.
- P.T. Barnum
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
- Richard Branson
Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes – and most fools do – but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one’s mistakes.
- Dale Carnegie
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
Every time I went on stage I was so terrified I almost threw up.
- Sara Blakely
If you know you have to wait anyway, why not make a decision to enjoy your life while you’re waiting? Why not be happy while God is in the process of changing things? After all, there’s nothing we can really do to make it happen any faster. We might as well relax and enjoy our lives, knowing that at the appointed time God is going to bring his plan to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.
- Reid Hoffman
China’s open-door policy, the favourable local exchange rates, the growing affluence and changing lifestyles in South Asian countries and burgeoning economic activities in the Asia-Pacific Rim are all conducive factors to the continuing tourism boom.
- Cheng Yu-tung
In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching.
- Bill Gates
The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.
- Peter Thiel
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The one essential character trait of any leader is personal integrity.
- David Novak
We all prospect, and don’t even know we’re doing it. When you start the dating process, you are actually prospecting for the person you want to marry. When you’re interviewing employees, you are prospecting for someone who will best fit your needs.
- Zig Ziglar
I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.
- Bill Gates
Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don’t believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you’re likely to have issues.
- Larry Page
My role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.
- Sam Walton
What you receive is directly connected to what you believe.
- Joel Olsteen
By the end of the war (the civil war) John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags, or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.
- Ron Chernow
Wal-Mart is an amazing success story. What I particularly admire very much about the late Sam Walton was his policy of valuing his employees. Giving value to employees is very rare in the retail industry. I also admire the strategies Walton used to build up his discount store concept.
- Tadashi Yanai
I pay about a third in taxes, I give away about a third, and I follow the law.
- Ray Dalio
Nothing I do is done by popular demand.
- Steve Martin
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
- Winston Churchill
You are what you are and you are where you are because of what has gone into your mind. You change what you are and you change where you are by changing what goes into your mind.
- Zig Ziglar
To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.
- Winston Churchill
If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil.
- Yoda
Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.
- Napoleon Hill
Most fears of rejection rest on the desire for approval from other people. Don’t base your self-esteem on their opinions.
- Harvey Mackay
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
- Peter Thiel
A smile, someone once said, costs nothing but gives much. It enriches those who receive without making poorer those who give. It takes but a moment, but the memory of it sometimes lasts forever. None is so rich or mighty that he cannot get along without it and none is so poor that he cannot be made rich by it. Yet a smile cannot be bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen, for it is something that is of no value to anyone until it is given away. Some people are too tired to give you a smile. Give them one of yours, as none needs a smile so much as he who has no more to give.15 Smile. It increases your face value.
- Dale Carnegie
We are still masters of our fate.We are still captains of our souls.
- Winston Churchill
This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook’s a free service. It’s free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.
- Mark Zuckerberg
It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.
- Reed Hastings
[On Twitter] This company is bigger than any individual.
- Jack Dorsey
A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate’s knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth.
- Ben Horowitz
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
- Dale Carnegie
For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.
- James C. Collins
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
- Dale Carnegie
I’m going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.
- Joel Olsteen
I think of myself more as a sportsman than I do an artist.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Worrying is a waste of time. Worrying gets in the way of solving problems.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do. It’s why Nike is Nike, it’s why Apple is Apple, it’s why Walt Disney built Disney World and it’s why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The Chinese government still would like to see U.S. Internet companies explore the Chinese market, providing they are willing to abide by Chinese law. I think companies like Facebook should think about the Chinese market.
- Robin Li
I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.
- Oprah Winfrey
Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate?
- Larry Page
The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.
- Bill Gates
Power should be reserved for weightlifting and boats, and leadership really involves responsibility.
- Herb Kelleher
The first thing I ever invested in was Twitter. Blaine Cook, former CTO, was leaving the company and asked me if I wanted to buy his stock.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.
- Elon Musk
We have a very wide range of content, but the brand-newest movies, what’s happening with those is a $30 pay-per-view option – not from Netflix but from DirecTV and others – of movies that are in the theater.
- Reed Hastings
Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.
- Winston Churchill
The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.
- Seth Godin
What a man’s mind can create, man’s character can control.
- Thomas Edison
In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China – execution is.
- Ma Huateng
Expect more than others think possible.
- Howard Schultz
We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions.
- Phil Knight
I found [retail] to be interesting, challenging, and fun.
- Michael Balmuth
We obviously are getting to be one of the largest players in the industry, so it’s hard to grow faster than that number, … But we’re very, very pleased with the last quarter results of 53 percent year-over-year. That’s on the upside, so I wouldn’t get too optimistic when it goes above 50 percent, just like we encouraged people two years ago, when it went below 30 percent growth for us, not to get too pessimistic.
- John Chambers
Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge….
- Thomas Edison
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
- Elon Musk
