If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.
- Sun Tzu
Notable Quotables
Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.
- Clayton M. Christensen
If you’re single and you want to get married, put an empty photo album on your table. That’s where you’re going to put your wedding photos. When you see it, you’re moving toward it.
- Joel Olsteen
May the Force be with you.
- Yoda
My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.
- Jeff Bezos
A lot of stuff I do out of pure obsessiveness.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Within the first year of launching my company, Spanx, I decided to go over to England and cold-call Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Selfridges the same way I had cold-called Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s here in the United States.
- Sara Blakely
I’m not a fan of the cursing method of management.
- David Robinson
I’m not averse to making a lot of money. But where does that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that the standard by which I should measure myself? Where does that take you if you’re in my business? I think it takes you to pretty dark, corrupt places.
- Timothy Ferriss
A knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization. It is meant for every one of the men I call executives.
- Peter Drucker
Those who do not know how to fight worry die young.
- Dale Carnegie
The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did
- Ben Horowitz
Around the survivors a perimeter create.
- Yoda
The real benefit of having goals is what you become by reaching them.
- Zig Ziglar
In periods of stress and grief, not only does your mind do funny things, you say things that surprise you.
- Phil Knight
Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.
- Charles Ergen
Checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.
- Atul Gawande
People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.
- John C. Maxwell
Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls– family, health, friends, integrity– are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered
- Gary Keller
Don’t solicit feedback on your product, your idea, or your business just for validation purposes. Be really careful about that. You want to tell the people that can help move your idea forward. But if you’re just looking to your friend, coworker, husband, wife, for validation, be careful. Because out of love… a lot of people will express some concerns, and it can stop a lot of multi-million dollar ideas right in their tracks.
- Sara Blakely
I’m trying to change the culture in New York City, that’s hard enough!
- Michael Bloomberg
Leaders who are kind of insecure or egocentric, they basically sabotage themselves.
- John C. Maxwell
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
- Henry Ford
The dollar has lost 90% of its value in the last century.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.
- Elon Musk
Success is one thing — but impact is another.
- Ray Lewis
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
We have two turbines in our company: One is engineering, and the other is operations. And so our business people are on equal footing with our engineering and technology culture. Cars are moving because of what we do, so there’s an imperative to go beyond just the technology.
- Travis Kalanick
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
The [Henderson] Group adopted a conservative approach in replenishing its land bank and focused its resources to convert agricultural land holdings in hand into development land in the past year with a view to bringing down the cost of land replenishment and good progress has been made in this respect.
- Lee Shau Kee
Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what’s coming.
- Steve Martin
I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.
- Phil Knight
As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
- Bill Gates
It’s Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.
- Larry Ellison
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly–until you can learn to do it well.
- Zig Ziglar
They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
- Aldous Huxley
Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.
- John Chambers
To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often.
- Winston Churchill
Whether you’re 9 or 90, stop trying to fix the things you’re bad at, and focus on the things you’re good at.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.
- Bill Gates
You have to be a crazy guy and a little eccentric to be very successful.
- Tadashi Yanai
Law of Clarity – If you can’t explain what you sell to a ten-year old child then you don’t know what you sell.
- Jerry Vass
This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.
- Bill Gates
Selling and delivering a product is at least as important as the product itself.
- Peter Thiel
Media companies focused on things like creating great stories whereas technology companies focused on creating a better way of doing things. We began to think about new ideas and about forming a new company.
- Ben Horowitz
If a job doesn’t excite you on some level—just because of the stuff of it—don’t settle.
- Jack Welch
Yes, iD is a machine vision and sensor browser for the physical world. That’s what we have been working on with Coca-Cola, Verizon, Bank of America and Disney to launch content when an image is recognised.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Well, clearly Apple is a role model of the American innovation whereby it produced all these products – iPod, iPhone, iPad – that are really now dominating all the technology arena in the world.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
- Dale Carnegie
One of the first things you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product. Similarly, a high quality human resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.
- Ben Horowitz
Sometimes, we’re so focused on being consistent that we also lower the bar on amazing.
- Seth Godin
In the game of life, before you get anything out, you must put something in!
- Zig Ziglar
You can change your world by changing your words… Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.
- Joel Olsteen
I think God’s justice is making wrongs right.
- Joel Olsteen
You know, the diversity that America has is so special. It’s starting to really become a cool thing for young people.
- Russell Simmons
Founding Fathers of U.S. set up processes, checks and balances designed to insure that their values lived on long after their passing.
- Jim Collins
It is the people who control the Government, not the Government the people.
- Winston Churchill
I intentionally abandoned the hard stuff early on because not only do I think it’s useless, I think it’s a distraction.
- Seth Godin
True joy comes when you inspire, encourage, and guide someone else on a path that benefits him or her.
- Zig Ziglar
If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it’s simply a poor use of resources.
- Timothy Ferriss
With the intensity of the first three NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series races at Atlanta Motor Speedway, fans have been treated to exciting finishes each race. Fans can expect nothing less than the same for the John Deere 200.
- Ed Clark
Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.
- Walt Disney
The squeaky wheel always getting the grease.
- James Taylor
To find the right things, we’ll need to go to the garden.
- Timothy Ferriss
Leaders never outgrow the need to change.
- John C. Maxwell
Good intentions aren’t enough. People have good intentions when they set a goal to do something, but then they miss a deadline or other milestone.
- Harvey Mackay
Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.
- Ben Horowitz
The politics of partisanship and the resulting inaction and excuses have paralyzed decision-making, primarily at the federal level, and the big issues of the day are not being addressed, leaving our future in jeopardy.
- Michael Bloomberg
I think it’s too early to tell.
- John Chambers
I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the site, and we’ve funded ever since by putting ads on the site.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution. It just needs clarity.
- Ben Horowitz
There are no rules here — we’re trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison
Over the past ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
- Ben Horowitz
Emerson said: Every man I meet is my superior in some way, In that, I learn of him.
- Dale Carnegie
Sooner or later, you will see a China-based company that really has a global impact, and I think Baidu has a chance to become one of those companies. We should be able to compete on a global basis.
- Robin Li
Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.
- Jack London
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
Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.
- Zig Ziglar
Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.
- Elon Musk
[On Twitter] This company is bigger than any individual.
- Jack Dorsey
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
- John Wooden
The level of analysis that is done when you see laws created, whether it’s the city or state or federal level – it’s much more horse-trading than analysis.
- Michael Bloomberg
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
We should be able to significantly improve health-care outcomes. The government is needing that. When you look at ACOs [accountable care organizations] and look at what the Obama administration is talking about, in trying to improve quality, that’s exactly what Express Scripts does.
- George Paz
I’m blessed to be a blessing to someone else.
- Joel Olsteen
The garden gleams with summer jewelry. We live vy simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & well provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy.
- Winston Churchill
People say that globalisation has negative aspects, but I don’t believe globalisation is bad. It’s criticised from a western perspective, but if you put yourself in the shoes of people in the developing world, it provides an unprecedented opportunity.
- Tadashi Yanai
For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary.
- Peter Thiel
I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it’s hard to get them out on the air.
- Steve Martin
The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.
- Seth Godin
I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It’s got the market. It’s got consumer confidence and it’s got banks throwing – I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.
- Jack Welch
Having a personality of caring about people is important. You cant be a good leader unless you generally like people. That is how you bring out the best in them.
- Richard Branson
You can’t grow long-term if you can’t eat short-term. Anybody can manage short. Anybody can manage long. Balancing those two things is what management is.
- Jack Welch
A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate.
- Donald Trump
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas, but the image is that they all come from the top. I’m afraid that’s not quite right.
- Bill Gates
Many marriages would be better if the husband and wife clearly understood that they’re on the same side.
- Zig Ziglar
Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.
- John C. Maxwell
And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.
- Richard Branson
I definitely believe that the so-called American decline is greatly exaggerated.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?” Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course… “Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!” Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price
- Winston Churchill
