Notable Quotables

People think, ‘Jack, you do too much.’

- Jack Ma

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

- Richard Branson

Steve really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn’t there. He took over the project, and it was really my own opinion — only my opinion — that he wanted to compete with the Lisa group that had kicked him out.

- Steve Wozniak

Create a vision and personalize it. People need to say, I understand it, I’m excited about it, and I can make it happen.

- David Novak

I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy.

- Michael Gerber

It’s Almost Impossible to Overinvest in Becoming the Market Leader.

- Seth Godin

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It’s the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

- Elon Musk

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

Young people in China and Hong Kong are the future of the motherland.

- Cheng Yu-tung

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

Great companies are built on great products.

- Elon Musk

Just like Mark Snider told the Board of Elections within a couple hours of when he first became aware of it… first of all, Mike and I didn’t even know anything about this till March 16, … Second of all, nobody benefited from this in any way, shape or form whatsoever.

- Michael Ward

You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m not a tech guy. I’m looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people’s eyes.

- Jack Ma

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

- Tadashi Yanai

A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.

- Seth Godin

Bordeaux would be naive not to recognize that Robert Parker was driving the brand equity. If the next generation doesn’t care about Chateau Pichon-Lalande, then you have a problem.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

God knows your value; He sees your potential. You may not understand everything you are going through right now. But hold your head up high, knowing that God is in control and he has a great plan and purpose for your life. Your dreams may not have turned out exactly as you’d hoped, but the bible says that God’s ways are better and higher than our ways, even when everybody else rejects you, remember, God stands before you with His arms open wide. He always accepts you. He always confirms your value. God sees your two good moves! You are His prized possession. No matter what you go through in life, no matter how many disappointments you suffer, your value in God’s eyes always remains the same. You will always be the apple of His eye. He will never give up on you, so don’t give up on yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

- Winston Churchill

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

- Thomas Jefferson

The idea is to have relationships where you make money and the other guy makes money, too. That’s how a business keeps its team together.

- Russell Simmons

Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.

- Zig Ziglar

I told [John Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb’, etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly.

- Thomas Edison

If you are going to be successful, you must develop persistence. How do you do that? It is not easily condensed in one simple statement, but one thing you can be sure of is that your must define your purpose.

- Zig Ziglar

Sometimes we look at gay being a bigger sin than being proud or not telling the truth. I don’t think God categorizes sins.

- Joel Olsteen

Visibility remains limited, and this should come as no surprise, given that our customers’ visibility is limited.

- John Chambers

Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it’s a good thing they’ll be reading a newspaper on a screen.

- Bill Gates

Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.

- Warren Buffett

One challenge is the Peter Principle. Coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book of that name, the Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain being unable to earn further promotions.

- Ben Horowitz

I love technology, and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.

- Steve Martin

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Tip #17 – Perceived value is what sells. Real value is what repeats.

- Jack Nadel

A corporation’s primary goal is to make money. Government’s primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others.

- Larry Ellison

Everything begins with a decision. Then, we have to manage that decision for the rest of your life.

- John C. Maxwell

The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.

- George Soros

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

- Andrew Carnegie

The Franchise Prototype is also the place where all assumptions are put to the test to see how well they work before becoming operational in the business.

- Michael Gerber

We have built a company with a business mix and operating system that will allow us to deliver record results in any foreseeable economic climate, … We have just completed a very successful management transition and I’ve never been more confident about the company’s future.

- Jack Welch

When we put $4 billion into the U.S. economy, they were OK with this. When we preserved jobs in Dearborn, or preserved jobs in Columbus, or preserved jobs in Pennsylvania, everyone was happy.

- Alexei Mordashov

Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.

- Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

- Thomas Edison

When I hung in, he saw character, and that was the end of it. Later, it was funny to watch him hazing other guys the same way – funny after you’d been through the cycle.

- Phil Knight

Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.

- Seth Godin

I cut the feet off of a pair of panty hose and it allowed me to wear a pair of great strappy sandals. I didn’t see lines but the hose rolled up at my feet – and that’s how Spanx born.

- Sara Blakely

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

- Winston Churchill

I love the presentation from the more flamboyant guy, who excitedly presents his plans.

- Jack Welch

Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I’d put myself in the latter category. But I’d never call myself a normal designer of anything.

- Steve Wozniak

Nowhere are the benefits of closer economic ties more pronounced than in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The two places have their own advantages. One has the manpower, natural resources and manufacturing might, while the other has the management skills and marketing know-how.

- Cheng Yu-tung

There’s a belief that you’re supposed to be poor, and suffering, and show your humility. I just don’t see the Bible that way. I see that God came and Jesus died so that we might live an abundant life and be a blessing to others.

- Joel Olsteen

I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.

- Walt Disney

You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.

- Andrew Carnegie

Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.

- Henry Ford

It is possible to become world-class, enter the top 5% of performers in the world, in almost any subject within 6-12 months, or even 6-12 weeks.

- Timothy Ferriss

I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.

- Bill Gates

When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.

- Bill Gates

Nine out of ten businesses fail, so I came up with a foolproof plan — create ten businesses.

- Robert Kiyosaki

The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered, “If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll be so late you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.

- Ben Horowitz

Arrange to meet with the members of your Master Mind group at least twice a week, and more often if possible, until you have jointly perfected the necessary plan or plans for the accumulation of money.

- Napoleon Hill

Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

- Yoda

Countries which receive aid do graduate. Within a generation, Korea went from being a big recipient to being a big aid donor. China used to get quite a bit of aid; now it’s aid-neutral.

- Bill Gates

Look at the product pipeline, look at the fantastic financial results we’ve had for the last five years. You only get that kind of performance on the innovation side, on the financial side, if you’re really listening and reacting to the best ideas of the people we have.

- Steve Ballmer

You reinforce the behaviors that you reward, he explained. If you reward candor, you’ll get it.

- Jack Welch

The little things in life frequently make the difference in success and failure.

- Zig Ziglar

After its return to China, Hong Kong has become an inseparable part of this large country by exerting its business strengths to become a vital member of the country and developing its four pillar industries, namely finance, commerce, shipping and professional services.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

- Helen Keller

Nobody ever accused me of wisdom of any kind, let alone conventional.

- Phil Knight

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

- Dale Carnegie

When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.

- Peter Thiel

From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.

- Peter Thiel

Man will occasionally stumble upon the truth but most times he will pick himself up and continue on.

- Winston Churchill

Until you are happy with who you are, you will never be happy because of what you have.

- Zig Ziglar

And being as wicked as any man who ever lived, he exploited his advantage to the full.

- Winston Churchill

As Indian companies strive to be globally competitive, they have realized the importance of investing in information technology and networking to adapt quickly to rapidly shifting market transitions.

- John Chambers

I think what’s happening for me, it’s fun to see other things besides Facebook and Twitter take hold. The maturity of Tumblr as a real player is exciting. I think Pinterest has proved to be a major player. It’s fun to see Instagram become a major player. It’s fun to watch things like SnapChat, and Vine, try to vie to be the next thing.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

- Bill Gates

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

- Elon Musk

The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American.

- Winston Churchill

We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1. In fact, there’s an epidemic of chronic disease.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make

- Donald Trump

The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.

- Seth Godin

From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.

- Ben Horowitz

Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.

- Ray Kroc

A key component of the Soft Sell is asking questions that require the Buyer to think and reach inside for the answer so as to reveal needs the Seller can fulfill with a product or service.

- Jerry Vass

It partly depends on the currency regimes in place in the country.

- John Chambers

No matter how senior you get in an organization, no matter how well you’re perceived to be doing, your job is never done. Every day, you get up and the world is changing; your customers are expecting more from you. Your competitors are putting pressure on you by doing more and trying to beat you here and beat you there.

- Abigail Johnson

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