Notable Quotables

It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

- Winston Churchill

It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.

- Thomas Edison

Well, we’re about 24 million subscribers today, and that’s up from about 15 million a year ago, so it’s a very high rate of growth, and that’s what’s exciting about the business – more and more people are getting smart TVs, they’re watching Netflix on their iPads.

- Reed Hastings

Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.

- Winston Churchill

The onset of global financial turmoil in the second half of 2008 and the resultant wait-and-see attitude adopted by some homebuyers put the property market into the doldrums, with a general decline in both transaction volume and transacted prices.

- Lee Shau Kee

He felt the Gettysburg Address was one of the greatest documents ever written, mainly because Lincoln had said so much with so few words.

- David Novak

There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.

- Seth Godin

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

- Richard P. Feynman

The market’s going to move with tremendous speed. If there is such a thing as a killer app, video is it.

- John Chambers

Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.

- Winston Churchill

How you look, talk, and market your business is what should be keeping everyone busy.

- Bryan Smith

I think Twitter is best when it sparks conversations elsewhere. To use YouTube and Facebook and all the tools we have available to us today to respond and also promote and answer and engage is awesome.

- Jack Dorsey

You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.

- Peter Thiel

From a global CEO and government leader perspective, we remain in a `show- me’ economy.

- John Chambers

I built a steel plant from the grassroots, so I learned all the nuts and bolts. When there was a problem, I would be able to guide them, though I am not a technical person.

- Lakshmi Mittal

The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat.

- Napoleon Hill

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.

- John C. Maxwell

I’m not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.

- Steve Ballmer

The invaders brought into Britain a principle common to all Germanic tribes, namely, the use of the money power to regulate all the legal relations of men. If there was any equality it was equality within each social grade. If there was liberty it was mainly liberty for the rich. If there were rights they were primarily the rights of property. There was no crime committed which could not be compounded by a money payment.

- Winston Churchill

Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.

- Bill Gates

You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself.

- Napoleon Hill

What I most identify with is effortless fashion, looking as if someone’s not put a lot of effort into their look.

- Sara Blakely

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us the latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.

- Mark Zuckerberg

God doesn’t look at how much we do, but with how much love we do it.

- Mother Teresa

What we’ve gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question ‘Can we trust Microsoft?’

- Steve Ballmer

I have ten marathons under my belt, including four New York races and one Boston.

- Harvey Mackay

God can cause opportunity to find you. He has unexpected blessings where you suddenly meet the right person, or suddenly your health improves, or suddenly you’re able to pay off your house. That’s God shifting things in your favor.

- Joel Olsteen

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

You can follow your favorite company or organization. You can also mix that in with your family and your social network and talk about all these interests in real time. That’s the value, not the brand ‘Twitter.’ Twitter just provides the venue for it.

- Jack Dorsey

If change is happening on the outside faster than on the inside the end is in sight.

- Jack Welch

I focus on giving specific, real-time coaching so my teammates can benefit immediately. Larry Senn taught me a very effective tool that works in both individual and team settings. Start out by sharing, here’s what you appreciate about a person’s work. By showing appreciation, you are setting the stage for acceptance of constructive suggestions. Then offer suggestions by saying, and you can be even more effective if you do such and such. And is a much better word than but because it’s additive by buillyng on a positive versus the usually negative but everyone is expecting to hear.

- David Novak

And well you should not. For my ally in the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. It’s energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we…(Yoda pinches Luke’s shoulder)…not this crude matter. (a sweeping gesture) You must feel the Force around you. (gesturing) Here, between you…me…the tree…the rock…everywhere! Yes, even between this land and that ship!

- Yoda

It’s not about size, it’s about your ability to make a difference. At that small size, collaboration is all the more important.

- John Chambers

More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.

- Peter Thiel

Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.

- Dale Carnegie

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

- Dale Carnegie

I will not allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure.

- Og Mandino

Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.

- John F. Kennedy

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

- Peter Thiel

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it’s hard to trust somebody that you don’t know.

- Ben Horowitz

Positive thinking is more than just a tagline. It changes the way we behave. And I firmly believe that when I am positive, it not only makes me better, but it also makes those around me better.

- Harvey Mackay

Optimists are those who go after Moby dick in a row boat with a bucket of tarter sauce.

- Zig Ziglar

if you want to achieve consistent performance, you need both parts of a 20 Mile March: a lower bound and an upper bound, a hurdle that you jump over and a ceiling that you will not rise above, the ambition to achieve and the self-control to hold back.

- James C. Collins

The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together.

- Peter Thiel

I do not believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process

- Oprah Winfrey

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

- Jack Welch

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

- Bill Gates

I mostly eat healthy. I just do. I’m not a vegan for health reasons – although obviously I’m 20 pounds lighter than when I started. I stayed 20 pounds lighter. I feel better. My friends say I look better. All that’s true. But I’m a vegan for compassionate reasons

- Russell Simmons

A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.

- Peter Thiel

There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Outside of your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. I don’t mean that we are to spend all our time focused on me, me, me to the exclusion of others. Instead, I mean that we must be healthy internally—emotionally and spiritually—in order to create healthy relationships with others. Motivational pep talks and techniques for achieving success are useless if a person is weighed down by guilt, shame, depression, rejection, bitterness, or crushed self-esteem. Countless marriages land on the rocks of divorce because unhealthy people marry thinking that marriage, or their spouse, will make them whole. Wrong. If you’re not a healthy single person you won’t be a healthy married person. Part of God’s purpose for every human life is wholeness and health. I love the words of Jesus in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” God knows we are the walking wounded in this world and He wants the opportunity to remove everything that limits us and heal every wound from which we suffer. Some wonder why God doesn’t just “fix” us automatically so we can get on with life. It’s because He wants our wounds to be our tutors to lead us to Him. Pain is a wonderful motivator and teacher! When the great Russian intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from the horrible Siberian work camp to which he was sent by Joseph Stalin, he said, “Thank you, prison!” It was the pain and suffering he endured that caused his eyes to be opened to the reality of the God of his childhood, to embrace his God anew in a personal way. When we are able to say thank you to the pain we have endured, we know we are ready to fulfill our purpose in life. When we resist the pain life brings us, all of our energy goes into resistance and we have none left for the pursuit of our purpose. It is the better part of wisdom to let pain do its work and shape us as it will. We will be wiser, deeper, and more productive in the long run. There is a great promise in the New Testament that says God comes to us to comfort us so we can turn around and comfort those who are hurting with the comfort we have received from Him (see 2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Make yourself available to God and to those who suffer. A large part of our own healing comes when we reach out with compassion to others.

- Zig Ziglar

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

- Thomas Carlyle

Being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.

- Peter Thiel

People who smile tend to manage, teach and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children.

- Dale Carnegie

Most of the exercise I get is from standing and walking all day from one laboratory table to another. I derive more benefit and entertainment from this than some of my friends and competitors get from playing games like golf.

- Thomas Edison

I’m sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn’t on our radar screen. We were just making great software.

- Bill Gates

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends coming in.

- John D. Rockefeller

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

I have never found a ship I wanted to go down with

- Jack Nadel

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

I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.

- Jeff Bezos

Put all excuses aside and remember this: YOU are capable.

- Zig Ziglar

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

Personally, I just hope that my family keeps getting bigger and bigger. That would make me very happy.

- Lee Shau Kee

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

- Winston Churchill

Money motivates neither the best people nor the best in people.

- Dee Hock

Money won’t make you happy… but everybody wants to find out for themselves.

- Zig Ziglar

Few people are logical. Most of us are prejudiced and biased. Most of us are blighted with preconceived notions, with jealousy, suspicion, fear, envy and pride.

- Dale Carnegie

There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice

- Simon Sinek

I learned that people don’t buy anything from unknown stores.

- Tadashi Yanai

When advice is freely given, the receiver is free to use it as he or she sees fit.

- Harvey Mackay

Checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.

- Atul Gawande

When I was growing up, I always knew I’d be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence.

- Sergey Brin

I think that diversity is key for the next American entrepreneurs. They want to be a part of this society where there is so much diversity they have to have people from all the experiences.

- Russell Simmons

We’ve seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we’re seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.

- Sergey Brin

People were expecting Rouge to go bankrupt, so there was a lot of anxiety. The corporate culture problem was even worse than in Russia. And at the same time, the work rules were more difficult.

- Alexei Mordashov

Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new.

- Peter Thiel

You are safer here tonight than you would be on the streets of any other city in the world.

- Michael Bloomberg

Find a job that you will be happy with and work hard at.

- Lee Shau Kee

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.

- Dale Carnegie

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

- John D. Rockefeller

Don’t use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe.

- Joel Olsteen

Foreign politicians don’t have resources – or limited resources. It’s useless dealing with them.

- Wang Jianlin

Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.

- Dale Carnegie

Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: ‘I may be wrong. Let’s examine the facts.

- Dale Carnegie

The craftsman and the artist say, “Here, I made this.” The workingman is asked to follow instructions.

- Seth Godin

[In June 2011] We’re focused on building a product and a business. Going public is an instrument and tool to help sustain the company. In the future, there may be an IPO, but I don’t know what the timing is.

- Jack Dorsey

the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.

- Dale Carnegie

The IRS! They’re like the Mafia, they can take anything they want!

- Jerry Seinfeld

Possession of Power That Was Not Acquired Through Self Effort.

- Napoleon Hill

If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.

- Jeff Bezos

The industry growth is there, and it’s there probably for the next decade. So how well we execute will determine what role we play.

- John Chambers

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