And being as wicked as any man who ever lived, he exploited his advantage to the full.
- Winston Churchill
Notable Quotables
Excepting for reading my numbers on Saturday morning and going to our regular meetings, I don’t have much of a routine for anything else. I always carry my little tape recorder on trips, to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.
- Sam Walton
Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
- Winston Churchill
An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.
- Jack Welch
A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.
- Seth Godin
Never, never, never give up.
- Winston Churchill
Look we gave this thing a good run. We both know it’s not working out. Let’s wrap this thing up.
- Jack Welch
Experience has taught me,” says Sam Wood, that it is safest to drop, as quickly as possible, people who pretend to be what they aren’t.
- Dale Carnegie
When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: Try to bear lightly what needs must be. Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.
- Dale Carnegie
So, if you look at what’s common among some of the companies I have, including the Four Seasons, NewsCorp, George V, the Plaza, these are all irreplaceable brands in their own fields.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
If you learn late, you pass it on to people so they can learn early. It’s a step process.
- Russell Simmons
Before you can be sure of your ability to transmute DESIRE into its monetary equivalent, you will require SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE of the service, merchandise or profession which you intend to offer in return for fortune.
- Napoleon Hill
I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.
- Sam Walton
Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four. I read the front-page headlines through.
- Timothy Ferriss
Selling an electric sports car creates an opportunity to fundamentally change the way America drives.
- Elon Musk
“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it eventually, just do it and correct course along the way.
- Timothy Ferriss
Buoyant consumer confidence will continue to underpin retial spending and hence rental growth for shopping centres. The office market is expected to perform well on the back of tight supply being met by keen demand from companies looking for expansion opportunities.
- Lee Shau Kee
Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I never took classic business classes in college, so I don’t have the background that any of the people running large companies have.
- Howard Schultz
Time is wasted because there is so much time available.
- Timothy Ferriss
When you get a thing the way you want it, leave it alone.
- Winston Churchill
Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.
- Winston Churchill
If I do you a favor you will reciprocate even in greater measure if possible. Through the proper use of this law / can get you to do whatever I wish you to do. If I wish you to dislike me and to lend your influence toward damaging me, I can accomplish this result by inflicting upon you the sort of treatment that I want you to inflict upon me through retaliation.
- Napoleon Hill
Sam phoned to tell me he was going to start a wholesale club. It was no surprise. He is notorious for looking at what everybody else does, taking the best of it, and then making it better.
- Sol Price
I will not lose, for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so it evens up for me.
- Jay-Z
Don’t equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don’t let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you’d like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea.
- Harvey Mackay
I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.
- Bill Gates
Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability…. We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.
- Thomas Edison
The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism.
- Peter Thiel
I usually describe myself as an engineer. That’s basically what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.
- Elon Musk
One day a friend came by the job site and asked them separately what they were doing. The first said, Aw, we’re just laying brick. We’ve been doing this for thirty years. It’s so boring. One brick on top of the other.” Then the friend asked the second bricklayer. He just lit up. Why, we’re building a magnificent skyscraper,” he said. This structure is going to stand tall for generations to come. I’m just so excited that I could be a part of it.” Each bricklayer’s happiness or lack of it was based on their perspective. You can be laying a brick or you can be building a beautiful skyscraper. The choice is up to you. You can go to work each day and just punch in on the clock and dread being there and do as little as possible. Or you can show up with enthusiasm and give it your best, knowing that you’re making the world a better place.
- Joel Olsteen
I definitely believe that the so-called American decline is greatly exaggerated.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
When you have the right staff, potential skyrockets.
- Napoleon Hill
We’re taking these steps because of the continuing slowdown in the U.S. economy and initial signs of a slowdown expanding to other parts of the world.
- John Chambers
If GE’s strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.
- Jack Welch
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
- George Eliot
He will give you strength for every battle, wisdom for every decision, peace that passes understanding. God will vindicate you for the wrongs that have been done. He will pay you back for unfair situations. He promised He will not only bring your dreams to pass but He will give you even the secret desires of your heart. Dare to trust Him. Come back to that place of peace. Quit being worried, stressed out, wondering if it will happen. God has you in the palm of His hand. He has never once failed before, and the good news is He is not about to start now.
- Joel Olsteen
In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where he wants to go, and gets up and goes.
- John Erskine
Choose wise and Godly people to advise you.
- George Foreman
I always knew I wanted to run a business someday.
- Michael Dell
Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.
- Wang Jianlin
The U.S. couldn’t even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They’ll be killing each other again in less than a year. I’m sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.
- Bill Gates
Ohhh. Great warrior.Wars not make one great.
- Yoda
Anyone would fight for things that matter, true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter
- Peter Thiel
If we don’t allow ourselves to make mistakes, we will never invest in things that are radical.
- Jeff Clavier
I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort.
- Sergey Brin
Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.
- Larry Ellison
When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.
- Winston Churchill
The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.
- Henry Ford
Someday, man will harness the rise and fall of the tides, imprison the power of the sun, and release atomic power.
- Thomas Edison
There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
- Peter Drucker
I do think – as self-serving as it sounds – that I was the right person, given the very, very strong headwind we had from the economy and our own issues, to come back and rewrite the future of the company.
- Howard Schultz
Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.
- Seth Godin
The ‘morality of compromise’ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.
- Andrew Carnegie
It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.
- Steve Jobs
I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn’t turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.
- Steve Martin
Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.
- Napoleon Hill
Life is too short to spend your precious time trying to convince a person who wants to live in gloom and doom otherwise. Give lifting that person your best shot, but don’t hang around long enough for his/her bad attitude to pull you down. Instead, surround yourself with optimistic people.
- Zig Ziglar
When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.
- Bill Gates
As we go forward, I hope we’re going to continue to use technology to make really big differences in how people live and work.
- Sergey Brin
Certainly, none of us enjoy going through struggles, but you have to understand that your struggle may be an opportunity for advancement and promotion. The very thing you are fighting against so tenaciously may be the springboard that catapults you to a new level of excellence. Your challenges may become your greatest assets.
- Joel Olsteen
Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
- Dale Carnegie
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
Chambers have numerous committees and serving on one of them provides numerous networking opportunities as well as professional leadership development.
- American Business Magazine
The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.
- Seth Godin
I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.
- Howard Schultz
I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.
- Dave Barry
We don’t live in a normal world, we live under a power law.
- Peter Thiel
There’s only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that’s already been written.
- Bill Gates
Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
- Michael Gerber
The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.
- Seth Godin
People have come to me over the years and said to me: ‘I admire the culture of Starbucks. Can you come give a speech and help us turn our culture around?’ I wish it were that easy. Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it’s based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.
- Howard Schultz
Think and Thank. Think of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.
- Dale Carnegie
Look at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. They have all entered many sectors, and actually, in many of those sectors, they weren’t as early as Tencent.
- Ma Huateng
People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast.
- Peter Thiel
Failures are life’s way of nudging you and letting you know you are off course. Trying new things and not being afraid to fail along the way are more important than what you learn in school.
- Sara Blakely
If you ask me whether the future is better than today, I would say yes; but the people must be ready to pay for services and pay their taxes.
- Aliko Dangote
As Indian companies strive to be globally competitive, they have realized the importance of investing in information technology and networking to adapt quickly to rapidly shifting market transitions.
- John Chambers
Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.
- Bill Gates
When you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.
- Zig Ziglar
Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today. I will be likened to the raindrop, which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking. I will persist until I succeed.
- Og Mandino
You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That’s how you know you’re still alive.
- Jerry Seinfeld
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
- Aristotle
Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.
- Peter Thiel
Ultimately, we wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.
- Phil Knight
The minute there’s a map, there is no art. Paint by numbers is not art. Paint by numbers is a mechanical activity.
- Seth Godin
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
- Dale Carnegie
We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.
- Henry Ford
By providing the systems that make the Internet work, Cisco is playing a major role in helping customers thrive in the explosive Internet economy. As a result, we are growing faster than all of our key competitors and have been the fastest growing and most profitable company in the history of the computer industry.
- John Chambers
I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.
- Bill Gates
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
- Jeff Bezos
Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
A peace talk is always difficult, always complicated.
- Jack Ma
The interview process takes twelve to fifteen hoursof your team’s time. This process is expensive for your team, so you should vet people in advance. A technique I use is to email the references and say, Rate this person one to ten. No one’s going to reply a five or a three by email; that means they hate the candidate. Call me is usually the response for a sub-seven rating. At the same time, nobody is going to reply with a ten. What you’re really looking for is a bunch of eights and nines. This is an exceptionally quick referencing system when you’re trying to triage a list.
- Reid Hoffman
A CEO’s job is to supervise all systems and to indentify weaknesses before the weaknesses turn into system failures. This can happen in many different ways, but it is exceptionally disconcerting when you company is growing rapidly. Your sales are increasing, your product of service is getting attention from the media, and suddenly you can’t deliver. Why? Uusually, it’s because your systems imploded from the increased demand. You didn’t have enough phone lines, or operators answering the phones. You didn’t have enough production capacity or enough hours in the week to meet the demand; or you didn’t have the money to build the product or hire additional help. Whatever the reason, you missed the opportunity to move your business to the next level of success due to failure of one of your systems…At each new level of growth, the CEO must start planning the systems needed to support the next level of growth, from phone lines to lines of credit for production needs. Systems drive both cash flow management and communication. As your systems get better, you or your employees will have to exert less and less effort. Without well-designed and successful operating systems, your business will be labor intensive. Once you have well-designed and successful operating systems, you will have a saleable business asset.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The factory has programmed that adventurous impulse out of us. The economic imperative of the last century has been to avoid risk, avoid change, and most of all, avoid exploration and the new. An efficient factory fears change because change means retooling and risk and a blip in productivity. Sure, we’ll put up with change if we have to, and welcome the predictable incremental change of productivity improvement, but please leave us alone when it comes to the word “bold.” Avoiding risk worked then but doesn’t work now. Now “what’s next?” is in fact the driving force for individuals and for organizations. Ever onward, ever faster.
- Seth Godin
People will always blame the poets for society’s ills. But these are the true artists.
- Russell Simmons
In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
- Ben Horowitz
