My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.
- Jack Ma
Notable Quotables
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
- Bill Gates
Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.
- Bill Gates
Be ‘hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise,’ and people will cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them over a lifetime – repeat them years after you have forgotten them.
- Dale Carnegie
Imagination is more important that knowledge
- Albert Einstein
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
- Randy Pausch
It’s not how far you fall. But how high you bounce that counts.
- Zig Ziglar
To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
- Peter Thiel
The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
- John C. Maxwell
If you go to a bad movie, it’s two hours. If you’re in a bad movie, it’s two years.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.
- Russell Simmons
Common Core is a big win for education.
- Bill Gates
A good book can be both a window to the world and a mirror to one’s self. It is easier to build community and remain true to the brand when you have zealots instead of marketing mercaries.
- Radical Marketing
Money without brains is always dangerous.
- Napoleon Hill
Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
- Peter Drucker
You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.
- Zig Ziglar
just like most nightmares, it’s not that big a deal and is reversible.
- Timothy Ferriss
Send out a cheerful, positive greeting, and most of the time you will get back a cheerful, positive greeting. It’s also true that if you send out a negative greeting, you will, in most cases, get back a negative greeting.
- Zig Ziglar
A lot of churches have not moved with the times.
- Joel Olsteen
Obviously I knew it was a great opportunity but I wasn’t expecting something as big as right now, what we see in Macau.
- Lui Che Woo
I want get across to not just the church world. I want to get outside those walls to everyday people.
- Joel Olsteen
Market fundamentalists recognize that the role of the state in the economy is always disruptive, inefficient, and generally has negative connotations. This leads them to believe that the market mechanism can take care of all the problems.
- George Soros
The thing you fear most has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. Facing the truth really will set you free.
- Oprah Winfrey
I have ways of making money that you know nothing about…(if you’re firm won’t sell) you will stand alone, Your firm can never make any more money in Cleveland. No use trying to do business in competition with Standard Oil Company. If you do (continue to fight) it will end in your being wiped out.
- John D. Rockefeller
The global economy has experienced considerable slowdown in recent times. However there has been one notable exception: China.
- Cheng Yu-tung
There should be order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.
- Ma Huateng
Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.
- P.T. Barnum
Actually, King Abdullah, under his supervision and guidance, has established a dialogue in Saudi Arabia whereby all the population, whether Shiite or Sunnis from north, south, west or east, they can get together and exchange their views.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed.
- Ben Horowitz
I enjoy the hunt much more than the ‘good life’ after the victory.
- Carl Icahn
Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.
- John D. Rockefeller
My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.
- Bill Gates
Success in the United States is not an entitlement in China. You have to go there and earn it, and earn it the right way.
- Howard Schultz
There is a good chance India may become our largest total sales market in the whole of Asia.
- John Chambers
Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
- Winston Churchill
Who am I winning for? Am I winning for Oracle shareholders or is it simply a matter of personal vanity? I’ll admit to it. Mea culpa. An awful lot of it is personal vanity.
- Larry Ellison
Connectivity enables transparency for better government, education, and health.
- Bill Gates
It takes a decade to grow trees but a century to nurture human beings.
- Cheng Yu-tung
My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.
- Elon Musk
I am a huge bull on this country. We will not have a double-dip recession at all. I see our businesses coming back almost across the board.
- Warren Buffett
Ask yourself a question: Is my attitude worth catching?
- Zig Ziglar
Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.
- Santana
It’s clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them.
- Seth Godin
Time is your most precious asset.
- Robert Kiyosaki
As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise – security, quality and worms.
- Ben Horowitz
God has amazing things in your future.
- Joel Olsteen
If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
I could never have imagined that firing 67 people on national television would actually make me more popular, especially with the younger generation.
- Donald Trump
It’s not going to happen alone.
- Jack Dorsey
We were guerilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit.
- Phil Knight
About the only thing ordinary salespeople agree upon is the idea that you must sell yourself first.
- Jerry Vass
I am also one of those persons who were transformed, who grew out of the Soviet system and transformed myself into the new Russia.
- Vagit Alekperov
The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves
- Ray Kroc
In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done, and they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield…march straightforward.
- Winston Churchill
I once dieted so religiously I quit eating in church.
- Zig Ziglar
We had no capital but we grew.
- Phil Knight
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
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.
- Napoleon Hill
Bell took the opposite approach, building multiple restaurants in a single neighborhood to eliminate the competition. It’s a strategy that’s widely used today by many companies like Starbuck’s, Barnes & Noble, and many others, and it worked for Bell.
- David Novak
If I was a businessman, or saw myself as a businessman, I would have never gone into the airline business.
- Richard Branson
Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.
- Winston Churchill
The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.
- Steve Martin
God didn’t create you to be average. You were created to excel You have everything.
- Joel Olsteen
I think the currency of leadership is transparency. You’ve got to be truthful. I don’t think you should be vulnerable every day, but there are moments where you’ve got to share your soul and conscience with people and show them who you are, and not be afraid of it.
- Howard Schultz
If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return – if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.
- Dale Carnegie
We thought this [downturn] would last for two quarters, … Now we are saying that it will last for at least – at least ? three quarters.
- John Chambers
In 2008, people who invested in hedge funds needed capital badly, but many of the funds would not return their money. However, I gave money back to any investor who requested it. It was the bottom of the market and a pretty tough time.
- Carl Icahn
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
Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.
- Larry Page
The pancreas is by far the most complex organ in the body.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Success is a choice
- Napoleon Hill
Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.
- Peter Thiel
STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.
- Peter Thiel
Backed by our conviction, we remain committed to investing wholeheartedly to improve the people’s living conditions, regardless of all uncertainties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I start where the last man left off.
- Thomas Edison
For every sale you miss because you were too enthusiastic, you’ll miss a hundred because you weren’t enthusiastic enough.
- Zig Ziglar
Search engine optimization is essentially about obtaining admission to an event in which you are competing. Getting invited to compete in the event has no bearing on how you do within the competition itself, but you don’t get to play in the game unless you are on Page 1 of Google search results.
- Clay Clark
Every one of my positions cuts – out half the country. I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gay rights, I’m pro-immigration, I’m against guns, I believe in Darwin.
- Michael Bloomberg
L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it’s just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.
- Steve Martin
If one dream dies, dream another dream. If you get knocked down, get back up and go again.
- Joel Olsteen
I have scary eyes. I look like the guy in ‘American History X,’ yes. I remember coming home from school and asking my mum if I could get an eye transplant, and of course she declined.
- Timothy Ferriss
Follow the GOLDEN RULE. Do unto others as you would have them do onto you.
- David Robinson
Indecision is the seedling of fear.
- Napoleon Hill
When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.
- Donald Trump
Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.
- Bill Cosby
I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.
- John D. Rockefeller
Some of the things I see around town are just disgusting.
- Jack Taylor
Age doesn’t matter, an open mind does.
- Timothy Ferriss
when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good.
- Dale Carnegie
The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.
- Peter Thiel
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
The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things.
- Ben Horowitz
It is no ordindary desire that survives disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism, and the constant reminding of waste of time. It is a burning desire an obsession! – Napoleon Hill (on leadership)
- Napoleon Hill
Consider scheduling a daily meeting with your new executive. Require them to bring a comprehensive set of questions about everything they heard that day but did not completely understand.
- Ben Horowitz
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
- Peter Thiel
If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.
- Peter Thiel
If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.
- Ben Horowitz
This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning.
- Winston Churchill
It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don’t feel like an oligarch.
- Vladimir Potanin
