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
Notable Quotables
You have enough people against you… be for yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.
- Mark Zuckerberg
There is no sure path to success, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone.
- Timothy Ferriss
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
- Winston Churchill
Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.
- Peter Thiel
I am a self-made brat.
- Stephen Wynn
Life is a buzzer box. Poke it.
- Seth Godin
I thought of a remark . . . that the United States is like a ‘gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’ Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.
- Winston Churchill
Lost time is never found again.
- Benjamin Franklin
Selling is problem solving, not hustling. Aggressiveness propels you into the mean streets, but ruin sales.
- Jerry Vass
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Little phrases such as ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ ‘Would you be so kind as to –?’ ‘Won’t you please?’ ‘Would you mind?’ ‘Thank you’ – little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life – and incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.
- Dale Carnegie
Names are the sweetest, most important sound in any language.
- Dale Carnegie
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.
- Bruce Lee
My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
The Starbucks customer and the Teavana customer are two very different customers, two different need states that are highly complimentary.
- Howard Schultz
Sometimes, your friend can influence you more than your mother.
- Lee Shau Kee
Make today worth remembering.
- Zig Ziglar
Don’t grow accustomed to living with less, doing less, and being less to the point that you eventually sit back and accept it.
- Joel Olsteen
The culture was strong enough to transcend the original company.
- Peter Thiel
Failure to deliver on committments is, in the end, unacceptable.
- Jack Welch
The beauty of this deal is bringing a clinical expertise. Medco had developed therapeutic resource centers, where they got their pharmacist to have specialties in things like diabetes, heart problems and asthma. Express Scripts took a different approach. We tried to understand why people do what they do with behavioral economics, which is: What drives human behaviors? What drives people to do what they did? By combining those two pieces, we get that much stronger.
- George Paz
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
- Mark Twain
Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.
- Seth Godin
The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest.
- Bill Gates
Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.
- Napoleon Hill
You can’t buy a good reputation, you must earn it.
- Harvey Mackay
Always go to the expert.
- Jack Nadel
I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
- Bill Gates
If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you. You will.
- Dale Carnegie
Allowing your kids to watch TV doesn’t have to mean they have no choice but to see commercials for junk food and alcohol.
- Charles Ergen
The first three-and-a-half months of calendar year 2001 have been extremely challenging for many of us in high-tech.
- John Chambers
What gets measured gets managed.
- Peter Drucker
For any Silicon Valley company, the most important thing is the company. And any great founders need to get out of the way of the company. We presented a spark with an idea.
- Jack Dorsey
When you’re green, your growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.
- Ray Kroc
I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.
- Og Mandino
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Start calling yourself healed, happy, whole, blessed, and prosperous. Stop talking to God about how big your mountains are, and start talking to your mountains about how big your God is!
- Joel Olsteen
This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.
- Clayton M. Christensen
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
- Thomas Edison
A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.
- Bob Dylan
Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be. As is your faith in the dark side of the Force.
- Yoda
Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
- Peter Drucker
Assume employees are going across a lot of networks. So you have to build in security from the home to any number of networks.
- John Chambers
The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit… a reputation, character.
- John D. Rockefeller
As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world.
- Rupert Murdoch
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
Your job is not to judge. Your job is not to figure out if someone deserves something. Your job is to lift the fallen, to restore the broken, and to heal the hurting.
- Joel Olsteen
Oracle’s latest database, version 12c, was specifically designed for the cloud. Oracle 12c makes all your Oracle applications multitenant applications without you having to make any changes whatsoever to your applications.
- Larry Ellison
My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.
- Peter Thiel
If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.
- Bill Gates
Learning to be a CEO through classroom training would be like learning to be an NFL quarterback through classroom training.
- Ben Horowitz
[On Twitter and Japan] We’ve had massive success in Japan… In Japan, it’s not 140 characters, it’s 140 words. So you could write a little mini-novel. This is a whole story in the universe.
- Jack Dorsey
Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.
- Steve Wozniak
When you do things the right way, you have nothing to lose because you have nothing to fear.
- Zig Ziglar
Churchill: The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labor Party): “If that had happened we should have lost the 1939 -45 war”.Churchill: No, it would have prevented that war.
- Winston Churchill
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.
- Steve Jobs
The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. ‘Impeccable credentials’ means you’ve never lived outside the United States.
- Michael Bloomberg
it was necessary to bait the hook to suit the fish.
- Dale Carnegie
John, never lend money to your friends; it will spoil your friendships.
- John D. Rockefeller
We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.
- Walt Disney
The basic principle is I command, and my employees carry it out immediately.
- Wang Jianlin
The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.
- Bill Gates
Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We’ll break out of it. It takes time.
- Warren Buffett
Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.
- Seth Godin
9 out of ten new businesses fail in the first five years.
- Robert Kiyosaki
No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.
- Bill Gates
I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I’m working at it.
- Steve Martin
We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.
- Larry Page
When you look at the dark side, careful you must be. For the dark side looks back.
- Yoda
You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.
- John C. Maxwell
If you wish to build a powerful personal network, branch out. Build a diverse network of professional contacts that includes people that don’t look like you, sound like you, speak like you or have your background, education or history. The only thing they should have in common with you and the other people in your network is that they should be really good at what they do. Create a personal network like that, and you’ll have a network that can help you succeed at anything.
- Ivan Misner
In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.
- Bill Gates
The Chinese market is a very good expansion opportunity for us, and we will continue looking to buy stakes and make acquisitions.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
- Peter Drucker
If you don’t let people flourish in their jobs, why are they going to stay?
- Joel Olsteen
When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.
- Zig Ziglar
Consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.
- Seth Godin
Teams only succeed when the players have a unified vision, no matter how much talent or potential there is.
- John Maxwell
Judgment of the people in the situation is not helpful. How can you help them is the question.
- Russell Simmons
On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.
- Seth Godin
When a person starts to talk about their dreams, it’s as if something bubbles up from within. Their eyes brighten, their face glows, and you can feel the excitement in their words.
- John C. Maxwell
It’s almost unfathomable how much I still have to learn. Learning never ends…I always have another mountain to climb is what keeps you going.
- David Novak
War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war:
- Peter Thiel
In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.
- Peter Thiel
To a child love is spelled T-I-M-E.
- Zig Ziglar
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.
- Winston Churchill
The time will never be right to start. Today is your day. Study successful people, do what they do, and you too will be successful.
- Clay Clark
There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.
- Seth Godin
I have ten marathons under my belt, including four New York races and one Boston.
- Harvey Mackay
Visionary companies are so clear about what they stand for and what they’re trying to achieve that they simply don’t have room for those unwilling or unable to fit their exacting standards.
- James C. Collins
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
We’ve got to lift our game tremendously. We’ll sell our business news and information in print, we’ll sell it to anyone who’s got a cable system, and we’ll sell it on the Web.
- Rupert Murdoch
Friend, there’s no greater investment in life than in being a people builder. Relationships are more important than our accomplishments.
- Joel Olsteen
I think Starbucks created a platform and, ultimately, a runway for many other companies to emulate. I suspect if we had not achieved what we have, there would have been many regional brands that would have succeeded. But I’m not sure there would have been a national brand of the scope of Starbucks.
- Howard Schultz
It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.
- Warren Buffett
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
Niklas Zennstroem has a thorough background as a successful entrepreneur with extensive expertise in areas such as IT and online.
- Stefan Persson
Your people give their days (and sometimes their nights) to you. They give their hands, brains, and hearts. Sure, the company pays them. It fills their wallets. But as a leader, you need to fill their souls. You can do that by getting in their skin, by giving the work meaning, by clearing obstacles, and by demonstrating the generosity gene. And you can do it, perhaps most powerfully, by creating an environment that’s exciting and enjoyable.
- Jack Welch
