Notable Quotables

But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.

- Peter Thiel

Failing is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night.

- Zig Ziglar

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike”, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel

He had all the attributes of a perfect man, and, in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed.

- Thomas Edison

In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they’ve discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.

- Seth Godin

The greatest decision of all time, as far as any American citizen is concerned was reached in Philadelphia, July 4th 1776, when 56 men signed their names to a document, which they well knew would bring freedom to all Americans, or leave every one of the fifty-six hanging from the gallows. On July 4th 1776 Thomas Jefferson stood before the Assembly and fearlessly read the most momentus Decision ever placed upon paper.

- Napoleon Hill

You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that’s wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.

- Elon Musk

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

The object of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater.

- Seth Godin

The best way to conduct research on a larger scale is to make sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing… The sooner the better – start talking to other people about what you’re doing. Because that’s what will stimulate things the fastest.

- James Simons

No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it’s Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Okay, let’s talk about cartoon labels for half a second – some people think anything with a dog or a car or a colorful alien is garbage, which is not true. Look at Big Moose Red. It’s, like, a $6 wine with a cheesy label, and it’s actually a solid wine.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

It makes no difference where you go, there you are. And it makes no difference what you have, there’s always more to want. Until you are happy with who you are, you will never be happy because of what you have.

- Zig Ziglar

Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.

- James C. Collins

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

- Winston Churchill

Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. A good product manager is the CEO of the product. Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product.

- Ben Horowitz

I prefer the old theaters because the audience is… trapped.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.

- Larry Page

I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.

- Bill Gates

Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] … by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks … to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly.

- Winston Churchill

I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.

- Elon Musk

Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don’t know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.

- Sam Walton

Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.

- Yoda

In bad times and good, I have never lost my sense zest for life

- Walt Disney

Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don’t approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.

- Bill Gates

My mother taught me something at a young age – she said ‘you are the company you keep’. To define yourself by some label or some level of resources – that’s pretty shallow.

- Howard Schultz

Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.

- Bill Gates

Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The entrepreneur community, there’s a certain kind of founder, they call them a ‘lone wolf.’ I probably fit in that category.

- Travis Kalanick

The ballplayer who loses his head can’t keep his cool, is worse than no ballplayer at all.

- Lou Gehrig

We must restore the emotional relationship that people have to the idea of America, that no matter where you come from, no matter where you live, that you have access to the same opportunities that somebody who is born in privilege.

- Howard Schultz

I know something about how to build constituencies in an independent way.

- Michael Bloomberg

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

- Dale Carnegie

Once we finished Christmas Rappin’ we began shopping it around town. There was interest, but no one was biting. The industry’s attitude was that Rapper’s Delight despite its U.S. sales and international appeal was an unrepeatable fluke. We identified Polygram which had a great roster of funk and R&B acts (Kool and the Gang, the Gap Band, Parliament) as the best place for Kurtis, so we made up a gang of test pressings and took them to clubs all over the city. Response in the street from DJs and club goers was great. So to hype up PolyGram we placed fake orders for the record into their system by telling retailers and wholesalers to order the 12 inch through PolyGram. PolyGram didn’t own it yet, but we created an appetite for Christmas Rappin that led them to buy it…So in the fall of 1979 Kurtis Blow signed with Mercury Records a division of Polygram Records, making him the first rapper on a major label…Christmas eve 1979 was the first time that I heard Christmas Rappin’ on the radio; I was upstairs at my family’s house. Frankie Crocker the biggest radio DJ in New York played it on WBLS.

- Russell Simmons

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

- Winston Churchill

Gain alignment every step of the way. Again, no involvement means no committment. Skip a layer and you will ultimately pay the price.

- David Novak

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

- Steve Jobs

I always saw myself wanting to do something deemed successful and good at the same time.

- Howard Schultz

It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.

- 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

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional. We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double-down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success.

- Jeff Bezos

If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook. And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone. If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault. That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. ‘I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.’ What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.

- Seth Godin

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.

- Mark Zuckerberg

My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids.

- Joel Olsteen

I didn’t think I would come to this conclusion — but eventually I came to the conclusion that more information is better, even if it is not as full as we would like to see.

- Sergey Brin

We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.

- Winston Churchill

Employees were invited to send complaints or suggestions directly to him and he always took an interest in their affairs. He was the best employer of his time, instituting hospitalization and retirement pensions. He was a fine boss if workers abided by the rules, but if they did something foolish, like show interest in a union, they promptly forfeited his sympathy. Rockefeller never acknowledged the legitamacy of organized labor, nor did he tolerate union organizers on his premises.

- Ron Chernow

When we are harassed and reach the limit of our own strength, many of us then turn in desperation to God-There are no atheists in foxholes. But why wait till we are desperate? Why not renew our strength every day? Why wait even until Sunday? For years I have had the habit of dropping into empty churches on weekday afternoons. When I feel that I am too rushed and hurried to spare a few minutes to think about spiritual things, I say to myself: Wait a minute, Dale Carnegie, wait a minute. Why all the feverish hurry and rush, little man? You need to pause and acquire a little perspective. At such times, I frequently drop into the first church that I find open. Although I am a Protestant, I frequently, on weekday afternoons, drop into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and remind myself that I’ll be dead in another thirty years, but that the great spiritual truths that all churches teach are eternal. I close my eyes and pray. I find that doing this calms my nerves, rests my body, clarifies my perspective, and helps me revalue my values. May I recommend this practice to you?

- Dale Carnegie

Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a byproduct – a byproduct of achievement.

- Ray Kroc

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

Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Your job isn’t to do your job. Your job is to decide what to do next.

- Seth Godin

Transparency is terribly important in a situation like this, as a quick reaction time, because news today is not immediate. It travels globally on the Internet. In our YouTube culture, dramatic videos take on a life of their own, beyond anyone’s control. – (on crisis management)

- David Novak

Essentially, whoever is successful, whoever is going to do things that make a difference, is going to be talked about.

- Mukesh Ambani

The Loire Valley is grossly underestimated. The prices are fair, and the wines are real.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

- Joel Olsteen

Common mission trap for companies: trying to be all things to all people at all times.

- Jack Welch

Losing an A is a sin. Love ‘em, hug ‘em, kiss ‘em, don’t lose them! We conduct postmortems on every A we lose and hold management accountable for losses.

- Jack Welch

The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.

- Seth Godin

Well I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

- Richard Branson

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

- Richard Branson

Many people say the privatisation was unfair: that is true – it was unfair. That is a fact: some people became rich and others did not. Unfair does not mean illegal, but it was inevitably unfair.

- Vladimir Potanin

Changes that used to occur over quarters are literally occurring over months.

- John Chambers

In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.

- Joel Olsteen

When times are bad is when you want to build! Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost more?

- Ray Kroc

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

- Bill Gates

True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.

- Zig Ziglar

What you need to keep most in the U.S. is the entrepreneurial spirit.

- Alexei Mordashov

The book ‘Do You!’ is about your inner voice. And when you connect to that voice then you – then the freedom comes. And we’re only here to be happy. So happy makes money. Money doesn’t make happy.

- Russell Simmons

We can consider 140 characters to be the full story, but it’s not. It’s just a caption. A headline for something broader.

- Jack Dorsey

You have to respect your parents. They are giving you an at-bat. If you’re an entrepreneur and go into the family business, you want to grow fast. Patience is important. But respect the other party… My dad and I pulled it off because we really respect each other.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary’s. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.

- Michael Bloomberg

Success is one thing you can’t pay for. You buy it on the installment plan and make payments every day.

- Zig Ziglar

Remain close to government and away from politics. It means deal more with the authorities. And less with individuals.

- Wang Jianlin

Perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular.

- Peter Thiel

It is clothes. It is parts. Therefore, you combine the parts differently to create your own unique expression.

- Tadashi Yanai

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.

- Yoda

There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.

- Oprah Winfrey

Do extremely difficult work.That seems obvious, right? If you do something that’s valued but scarce because it’s difficult, you’re more likely to be in demand and to be compensated fairly for what you do.The implication is stunning, though: When designing a project or developing a skill, seek out the most difficult parts to master and contribute. If it’s easy, it’s not for you.

- Seth Godin

Creating content that allows us to share our experiences, thoughts, and ideas in real time is becoming an intrinsic part of life in the twenty-first century.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

3D is a way of organizing things, particularly as we’re getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we’ve ever had before.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft

- Bill Gates

We have more than six and one-half times the level of wealth of our non-millionaire neighbors, but, in our neighborhood, these non-millionaires outnumber us better than three to one. Could it be that they have chosen to trade wealth for acquiring high-status material possessions?

- The Millionaire Next Door

For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.

- Dale Carnegie

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

- Jeff Bezos

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

- Peter Thiel

You’re only as good as the people you hire.

- Ray Kroc

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