Notable Quotables

It turned out there was alot to learn about running a store. And, of course, what really drove Sam was that competition across the street – John Dunham over at the Sterling Store. Sam was always over there checking on John. Always. Looking at his prices, looking at his displays, looking at what was going on. He was always looking for a way to do a better job. I don’t remember the details, but I remember some kind of panty-price-war they got into. Later on, long after we left Newport, and John had retired, we would seem him and he would laugh about Sam always being in his store. But I’m sure it aggravate him quite a bit early on. John had never had good competition before Sam. Helen Walton (Sam’s Wife): That Newport store was really the beginning of where Walmart is today. We did everything. We would wash windows, sweep floors, trim windows. We did all the stockroom work checked the freight in. Everything it took to run a store. We had to keep expenses to a minimum. That is where it started, year ago. Our money was made by controlling expenses. That, and Sam always being ingeniious. He never stopped trying to do something different. One thing, though I never forgave him for making me clean out that damned ice cream machine…

- Bud Walton

Nobody’s ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there’s some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.

- Richard Branson

Life is too short to spend your precious time trying to convince a person who wants to live in gloom and doom otherwise. Give lifting that person your best shot, but don’t hang around long enough for his/her bad attitude to pull you down. Instead, surround yourself with optimistic people.

- Zig Ziglar

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.

- Bill Gates

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

- Richard Branson

But innovation and change make inordinate time demands on the executive. All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done.

- Peter Drucker

Some people do really find fault like there’s a reward for it.

- Zig Ziglar

Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.

- Peter Thiel

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Perhaps your challenge isn’t finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.

- Seth Godin

Quite or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

- Seth Godin

Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.

- Peter Drucker

Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.

- Oprah Winfrey

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

- Dave Barry

For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.

- Peter Thiel

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That’s a beautiful deleveraging.

- Ray Dalio

[On Square in July 2011] We’re going to make it amazing.

- Jack Dorsey

If the United States has to accept the U.N. resolutions, we have to generalize it across the board. We can’t just pick and choose where we impose and accept the U.N. resolution and don’t accept them. U.N. Resolution 242 is very clear and states very clearly that Israel has to go back to the borders of the pre-war of 1967.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

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

- Bill Gates

PRINCIPLE 1 The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. PRINCIPLE 2 Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, You’re wrong.” PRINCIPLE 3 If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. PRINCIPLE 4 Begin in a friendly way. PRINCIPLE 5 Get the other person saying yes, yes” immediately. PRINCIPLE 6 Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. PRINCIPLE 7 Let the other person feel that the idea.

- Dale Carnegie

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

Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

- Elon Musk

I hate politics. What they say and what they do is completely different.

- Tadashi Yanai

The Internet revolution will determine which companies survive and which get left behind, … Increasingly, the Internet is recognized as the key driver in our global economy.

- John Chambers

I don’t believe in saturation. We’re thinking and talking worldwide.

- Ray Kroc

Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.

- Seth Godin

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

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

- Michael Gerber

Just as the process of repealing national alcohol prohibition began with individual states repealing their own prohibition laws, so individual states must now take the initiative with respect to repealing marijuana prohibition laws.

- George Soros

You may never get to that perfect world that you’re waiting for where everything’s going to be perfect and you got that much money and your house paid off.

- Joel Olsteen

There is a revolution happening, and within two years I think that Wi-Fi and Netflix will be built into all the televisions.

- Reed Hastings

The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.

- Peter Thiel

The premium single-cup segment is the fastest-growing business within the global coffee industry.

- Howard Schultz

Look, winning and losing can’t be quantified. They are states of mind, and losing happens only when you give up. Seen that way, then, the world can be filled with winners, and there is room for them all.

- Jack Welch

I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don’t know what the future is going to hold.

- Ray Dalio

[On stopping working and focussing 100% on his company Nike] I was still teaching accounting, but the next year, I told Penny [married in 1968] if we sell $300,000 worth of product, I’m going to go full-time. She was pregnant and a little anxious. We hit $290,000. I said, that ‘s close enough.

- Phil Knight

Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gaining confidence, seeing how you react. If you’re in control. They’re in the control.

- Tom Landry

A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.

- Peter Thiel

TECHNIQUES IN HANDLING PEOPLE Principle 1—Don’t criticize, condemn or complain. Principle 2—Give honest and sincere appreciation. Principle 3—Arouse in the other person an eager want.

- Dale Carnegie

My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — everyday I’m learning something new.

- Richard Branson

If something is expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

- Bill Gates

Alibaba is an ecosystem that helps small business to grow.

- Jack Ma

Churchill: The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labor Party): “If that had happened we should have lost the 1939 -45 war”.Churchill: No, it would have prevented that war.

- Winston Churchill

One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.

- Ben Horowitz

Being nice to people is just 20% of providing good customer service. The important part is designing systems that allow you to do the job right the first time. All the smiles in the world arent going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants. –

- Service Profit Chain

Lanai at one time grew 98% of the world’s pineapples. But the world’s pineapples are now grown in two places, Costa Rica and Panama, because no one wants to spend $45 for a pineapple from the United States.

- Larry Ellison

And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.

- Winston Churchill

That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity.

- Beryl Markham

The market … demands a signal from you that you’re serious, powerful, accepted, and safe.

- Seth Godin

A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy, so (he keeps) coming back, which pleases the shareholder.

- Herb Kelleher

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

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

Dinner would have been splendid…if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess.

- Winston Churchill

He will give you strength for every battle, wisdom for every decision, peace that passes understanding. God will vindicate you for the wrongs that have been done. He will pay you back for unfair situations. He promised He will not only bring your dreams to pass but He will give you even the secret desires of your heart. Dare to trust Him. Come back to that place of peace. Quit being worried, stressed out, wondering if it will happen. God has you in the palm of His hand. He has never once failed before, and the good news is He is not about to start now.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Ray Kroc

Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.

- Zig Ziglar

Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It’s something you have to learn. It’s a very lonely job.

- Ben Horowitz

I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.

- Howard Schultz

If you give people tools, [and they use] their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.

- Bill Gates

At the age of 30, one can overcome difficulties. By the age of 40, one has thorough appreciation of and insights into the world and becomes firmly self-assured without being carried away by all those irregularities in life.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I once dieted so religiously I quit eating in church.

- Zig Ziglar

Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

- Peter Thiel

I wanted to be a sailor, I wanted to sail the world, to navigate it.

- Jack Dorsey

Always have something to say. The man who has something to say and who is known never to speak unless he has, is sure to be listened to.

- Dale Carnegie

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

- Seneca

Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win.

- Peter Thiel

My father had a series of blue-collar jobs and never made more than $20,000 a year. When I was seven, he got injured on a job. That was a very important point – because of the injury, he couldn’t walk, and the company he was working for did not pay him. There was no compensation. So there was no money and no food.

- Howard Schultz

If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?

- Ben Horowitz

People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don’t like change. A bunch of people don’t like the Olympics now because we’ve added skateboarding… We’re modernizing the sport.

- Larry Ellison

If standard of living is your major objective, quality of life almost never improves, but if quality of life is your number one objective, your standard of living almost always improves.

- Zig Ziglar

It is unhealthy to marinate in your own press clippings.

- Sam Walton

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

- Bill Gates

I hate how many people think “glass half-empty” when their glass is really four-fifths full. I’m grateful when I have one drop in the glass because I know exactly what to do with it.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Marketing is every bit of contact your company has with anyone in the outside world. Every bit of contact. That means a lot of marketing opportunities. It does not mean investing a lot of money.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

But Governments and peoples do not always take rational decisions. Sometimes they take mad decisions, or one set of people get control who compel all others to obey and aid them in folly.

- Winston Churchill

SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.

- Bill Gates

Selling an electric sports car creates an opportunity to fundamentally change the way America drives.

- Elon Musk

The millionaires and billionaires who chose to invest in Australia are actually those who most help the poor and our young. This secret needs to be spread widely.

- Gina Rinehart

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

- Warren Buffett

Well we know that people in Austrailia love the idea of both Impulse and Virgin Blue getting up and adding a bit of competition, and it’s fun to be able to deliver it.

- Richard Branson

If you go to a bad movie, it’s two hours. If you’re in a bad movie, it’s two years.

- Jerry Seinfeld

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. 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

The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realise in some subtle way that you realise their importance, and recognise it sincerely.

- Dale Carnegie

Speed is of the essence in responding to a crisis situation, and our focus is squarely on mobilizing resources to help in the relief and rebuilding efforts, while also helping customers and employees recover.

- John Chambers

Team Together / Team Apart means you respect the final decision even if you would do something diffently, and make it happen with positive energy.

- David Novak

The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.

- Peter Drucker

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