Learn from the past, but don’t live there. Build on what you know so that you don’t repeat mistakes. Resolve to learn something new every day. Because every 24 hours, you have the opportunity to have the best day of your company’s life.
- Harvey Mackay
Notable Quotables
There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice
- Simon Sinek
I’m blessed to be a blessing to someone else.
- Joel Olsteen
In the old generation, if one kid bought a PlayStation 2 and the other kid bought an Xbox, at his house you played PlayStation, at your house you played Xbox. Now that it’s online, all those early buyers who… you want to play with, they’ve got their reputation online of who they are and how good they are at these games.
- Bill Gates
There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.
- Andrew Carnegie
You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
- W. Clement Stone
Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.
- Winston Churchill
I actually do think you’re seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that’s a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what’s going on with them.
- Mark Zuckerberg
In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.
- Ben Horowitz
The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without vicory there is no survival.
- Winston Churchill
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize any-one. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.
- Dale Carnegie
Europe has always represented a major strategic opportunity to achieve our goal of creating and building an enduring global brand.
- Howard Schultz
I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say what is and what is definitely not possible.
- Henry Ford
I work hard, I eat fishballs and noodles. I drink coffee and tea from a street vendor. I am quite casual about personal wealth, life hasn’t changed at all.
- Lui Che Woo
The part of uranium that’s fissile – when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two – is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.
- Bill Gates
I am very lucky that I have talented and creative people around me. Also, mediation has been a very big part of my freedom, because it allows me to watch all the things going on and allows me to focus.
- Russell Simmons
The Interros strategy toward various assets generally depends on the stage of their development and level of their maturity.
- Vladimir Potanin
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.
- Jeff Bezos
Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
- Steve Jobs
Prospering just doesn’t have to do with money.
- Joel Olsteen
What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people – ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.
- Larry Ellison
At the same time, you have to look for detractors among the group because one bad seed can be like a leak in the dime that leads to a major flood. The best thing you can do when you find someone like that is to fire him as quickly as possible!
- David Novak
Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.
- Henry Ford
Your workforce is your most valuable asset. The knowledge and skills they have represent the fuel that drives the engine of business – and you can leverage that knowledge.
- Harvey Mackay
We can never own property (because of property taxes) we can just control it (by renting it from the government by paying taxes).
- Robert Kiyosaki
Being a great leader means sometimes pissing people off.
- Colin Powell
I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.
- Oprah Winfrey
The indefiniteness of finance can be bizarre. Think about what happens when successful entrepreneurs sell their company. What do they do with the money? In a financialized world, it unfolds like this: • The founders don’t know what to do with it, so they give it to a large bank. • The bankers don’t know what to do with it.
- Peter Thiel
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.
- Henry Ford
God wants you to be a winner, not a whiner.
- Joel Olsteen
Obstacles can’t stop you. Problems can’t stop you. Most of all, other people can’t stop you. Only you can stop you.
- J. Gitomer
It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?
- Peter Thiel
Lack of Persistence.
- Napoleon Hill
There’s been so much corruption and so much cronyism in the taxi industry and so much regulatory capture, that if you ask for permission upfront for something that’s already legal, you’ll never get it.
- Travis Kalanick
Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
- Winston Churchill
I try to use my voice. I know that celebrity is valuable, and people do listen.
- Russell Simmons
The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.
- Ray Kroc
Motivation is the fuel, necessary to keep the human engine running.
- Zig Ziglar
There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we’ve got a system that allows them to do it.
- Warren Buffett
We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.
- Winston Churchill
A full and fair discussion is essential to democracy.
- George Soros
Takings were down by 25 per cent as a result of the security scares following the London bombings.
- Michael Ward
You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.
- Seth Godin
What is school for? If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.
- Seth Godin
A definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.
- Peter Thiel
If Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be riding around on a donkey. He’d be taking a plane, he’d be using the media.
- Joel Olsteen
Stock market bubbles don’t grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but reality as distorted by a misconception.
- George Soros
The thing that I’m most passionate about, I’m writing a book called ‘Jab Jab Jab Jab Jab Right Hook,’ and it really focuses on how to story-tell in a noisy, ADD world.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Never consider the possibility of failure. As long as you persist, you will be successful.
- Brian Tracy
He looks like a female llama who has just been surprised in her bath.
- Winston Churchill
I want people to know their palate is a snowflake. We all like different things. Why should we all have the same taste in wines?
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If you go out looking for friends, you’re going to find they are very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.
- Zig Ziglar
It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.
- Bill Gates
The person who has technical knowledge plus the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people—that person is headed for higher earning power.
- Dale Carnegie
“High expectations are the key to everything.”
- Sam Walton
Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.
- Zig Ziglar
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
- Ben Horowitz
Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed, A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden of weeds.
- John D. Rockefeller
If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.
- Howard Schultz
No matter how many times you get knocked down, keep getting back up. God sees your resolve. He sees your determination. And when you do everything you can do, that’s when God will step in and do what you can’t do.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t won that AOL deal
- Sergey Brin
Believe in your idea, trust your instincts, and don’t be afraid to fail. It took me two years from the time I had the idea for Spanx until the time I had a product in hand ready to sell into stores. I must have heard the word “no” a thousand times. If you believe in your idea 100%, don’t let anyone stop you! Not being afraid to fail is a key part of the success of Spanx.
- Sara Blakely
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
- Warren G. Bennis
You have a real chance to make an impact, but you have to do it in the first 90 days. Otherwise they’ll think it’s going to be business as usual.
- David Novak
A smart manager will establish a culture of gratitude. Expand the appreciative attitude to suppliers, vendors, delivery people, and of course, customers.
- Harvey Mackay
Economic cycles come and go…
- Cheng Yu-tung
Checks should be endorsed immediately: FOR DEPOSIT ONLY.
- Robert Kiyosaki
It’s not Pinterest where people are putting up pins. You’re changing the way cities work, and that’s fundamentally a third rail. We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an as—hole named Taxi.
- Travis Kalanick
When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.
- Napoleon Hill
You need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
We believe that it is better to give one a rod to fish rather than just dole out fish to them.
- Henry Sy
One of the cornerstones of what I believe will be the future is wave after wave of applications.
- John Chambers
The trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
- Peter Thiel
I’m less interested in how people are following each other and more interested in how they are following topics and tweets themselves. People are following more key words and concepts and more ideas and acting on those rather than individuals or organizations.
- Jack Dorsey
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.
- Peter Thiel
[On exporting sports shoes from Japan to the US]The best hope for exports lay with Onitsuka Company. So I made a cold call on them.
- Phil Knight
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.
- Winston Churchill
I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical.
- Bill Gates
Good talkers often choose to become sales professionals. Unfortunately, they don’t understand that selling well means listening well.
- Jerry Vass
I would hope that , where possible, the newspaper will devote more thought to our commercial interests. In my view, there are sometimes news items that require a lot of caution. For instance, articles that talk about contracts being negotiated. There is some news that does more harm than good. The risk is that it threatens the commercial or industrial interests of our country.
- Serge Dassault
[Medco] had a different culture with respect to spending money. I believe health care demands that we be as frugal as possible and pay money for things that matter. We’re pretty frugal. Everybody has the same size offices. Everybody has the same size cube. There are no perks.
- George Paz
Stop whining, start hustling.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
- Henry Ford
The Group is well positioned to meet the challenges ahead and will as ever continue to pursue higher growth.
- Cheng Yu-tung
In the Next Society’s corporation, top management will be the company. Everything else can be outsourced.
- Peter Drucker
A Prius is not a true hybrid, really. The current Prius is, like, 2 percent electric. It’s a gasoline car with slightly better mileage.
- Elon Musk
We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.
- Michael Bloomberg
I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Twenty years and $40 billion. They seem like good round numbers.
- Michael Dell
Traditional corporations, particularly large-scale service and manufacturing businesses are organized for efficiency. Or consistency. But not joy. Joy comes from surprise and connection and humanity and transparency and new…If you fear special requests, if you staff with cogs, if you have to put it all in a manual, then the chances of amazing someone are really quite low. These organizations have people who will try to patch problems over after the fact, instead of motivated people eager to delight on the spot.The alternative, it seems, is to organize for joy. These are the companies that give their people the freedom (and the expectation) that they will create, connect and surprise. These are the organizations that embrace someone who make a difference, as opposed to searching the employee handbook for a rule that was violated.
- Seth Godin
Whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh, students and researchers can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon.
- Sergey Brin
We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.
- Henry Ford
I’m not an actor who appears on the stage and gives people advice on how to live or what to do and entertains them. It is not my specialty.
- Vagit Alekperov
From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.
- Thomas Edison
It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
- Timothy Ferriss
TweetDeck is a very interesting client, because it presents a view that no other client in the world presents, which is this multicolumn, massive amounts of information in one pane. And people really, really enjoy that.
- Jack Dorsey
Success-minded people have no trouble at all following proven instructions. We all would be happy to follow a map if the map came with a guarantee. There is no guarantee, though. There are no maps. They’ve all been taken, and their value is not what it used to be, because your competitors have maps, too. The opportunity lies in pursuing your curiosity instead. Curiosity is not allergic to failure. Curiosity drives us to the haunted house because the thrills lie in what we don’t expect, not in what’s safe. Curiosity can start us down the path to shipping, to bringing things to the world, to examining them, refining them, and repeating the process again (and again).
- Seth Godin
