[On becoming in 1969 a full-time employee of his five year old company] There were nervous moments. Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Knight guarantee liabilities to the tune of $300,000,’ Penny’d say, ‘We don’t have $300,000.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t care. Just sign the thing.’
- Phil Knight
Notable Quotables
Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.
- Seth Godin
Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
- Winston Churchill
So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.
- Reed Hastings
There is little success where there is little laughter.
- Andrew Carnegie
Shaw once remarked: If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
- Dale Carnegie
If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
- Timothy Ferriss
Make sure your ego lies in the performance of the company, not in the performance of the stock.
- Warren Buffett
It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.
- Warren Buffett
Good policies without the right people will achieve nothing.
- Aliko Dangote
Ranking among the greatest Christmas movie classics, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ tells a beautiful story about the priceless value of relationships.
- John C. Maxwell
One piece of advice that always stuck in my mind is that people should be respected and trusted as people, not because of their position or title.
- Herb Kelleher
Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Don’t fight change; embrace it, and you will step into the fullness of what God has in store.
- Joel Olsteen
Man will occasionally stumble upon the truth but most times he will pick himself up and continue on.
- Winston Churchill
We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.
- Walt Disney
I’ve always believed that businesses should be good citizens…
- Phil Knight
Start where you stand and with what you have
- George Washington Carver
Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.
- Henry Ford
The austerity policies for the mainland property market will remain intact in 2011.
- Lee Shau Kee
Facing reality sounds simple, but it isn’t. I found it hard to get people to see a situation for what it is and not for what it was, or what they hoped it would be.
- Jack Welch
The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.
- Warren Buffett
Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen.
- Winston Churchill
If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
- Peter Thiel
We’re working toward the ability for all Cisco devices to work together and communicate with each other to stop attacks. The idea is that one device can warn another device of a threat.
- John Chambers
The Group will continue to press ahead steadily with an open mindset, a practical attitude, a broad vision and a unique insight, adhering to its ultimate objective of serving the nation and the wider community in the changing landscape.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Most fears of rejection rest on the desire for approval from other people. Don’t base your self-esteem on their opinions.
- Harvey Mackay
Fulfilling the vision of the Irvine Ranch master plan has been a lifetime dedication and lifetime passion, and I am hopeful the heritage of our Irvine stewardship will live on in many new ways.
- Donald Bren
The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
- Peter Drucker
If you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. Write down your answers to these questions, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit – aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer.1. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.2. What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probably scenarios?4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?5. What are you putting off out of fear?6. What is it costing you – financially, emotionally, and physically – to postpone action?7. What are you waiting for?
- Timothy Ferriss
If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.
- Zig Ziglar
Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.
- Bill Gates
Being excellent is hard. So when you have something hard to do, remember you are being excellent. Do you want to be remembered for being good or great?
- Lee Cockerell
In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.
- Lee Iacocca
Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is my go-to song to pump myself up if I’m having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.
- Sara Blakely
Your first projects aren’t the greatest things in the world, and they may have no money value, they may go nowhere, but that is how you learn – you put so much effort into making something right if it is for yourself.
- Steve Wozniak
Success is never accidental.
- Peter Thiel
I think failure is nothing more than life’s way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating. Most people attach failure to something not working out or how people perceive you. This way, it is about answering to yourself.
- Sara Blakely
A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.
- Ben Horowitz
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
The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.
- Bill Gates
We’ve announced an Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, a bunch of low-cost commodity servers running Linux, integrated in our case, with InfiniBand – connected with InfiniBand vs. the traditional Ethernet.
- Larry Ellison
PR is gift-wrapping. If you package a bracelet in a Tiffany box, it will have a higher perceived value than if you presented it in a Kmart box.
- Michael Levine
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.
- Bill Gates
Good intentions aren’t enough. People have good intentions when they set a goal to do something, but then they miss a deadline or other milestone.
- Harvey Mackay
In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems. A brain, no matter how big, cannot solve a problem it doesn’t know about.
- Ben Horowitz
If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason.
- Timothy Ferriss
I always follow 4E’s wrapped in a ‘P’.
- Jack Welch
I haven’t failed,I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
- Zig Ziglar
The chef that grew up with the grandma who cooks tends to always beat the chef that went to the culinary institute. It’s in the blood.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The successful business executive can handle challenges and solve problems at a remarkable clip.
- Zig Ziglar
I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man…Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters – seldom in any school of writing.Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object….we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration:’The world is my country; to do good my religion.’Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in ‘The Rights of Man’, and that genius busy at his favorite task – liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, ‘The Rights of Man’ yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke’s effort in his ‘Reflections’.Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him.’Tom Paine is quite right,’ said Pitt, the Prime Minister, ‘but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.’Here we see the progressive quality of Paine’s genius at its best. ‘The Rights of Man’ amplified and reasserted what already had been said in ‘Common Sense’, with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France.So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre’s enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument.But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of ‘The Age of Reason’ and now turned his time to the latter part.Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events ‘The Age of Reason’ appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle – a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking.
- Thomas Edison
More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
- Peter Thiel
Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
- Steve Jobs
You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.
- Peter Thiel
If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed.
- Winston Churchill
We want Google to be the third half of your brain.
- Sergey Brin
Desire is what takes the hot water of mediocrity and turns it into the steam of outstanding success.
- Zig Ziglar
The way of the warrior: keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day might be his last, he will conduct himself properly in all his actions.
- Principle of the Bushido
Hold on to that new, enlarge vision of victory that God has given you. Start expecting things to change in your favor. Dare to boldly declare that you are standing strong against the forces of darkness.
- Joel Olsteen
And because no matter who you are, if you believe in yourself and your dream, New York will always be the place for you.
- Michael Bloomberg
But what do average people do? The exact opposite. If they don’t like a thing, they bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say nothing.
- Dale Carnegie
I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.
- Walt Disney
To change somebody’s behavior, change the level of respect she receives by giving her a fine reputation to live up to. Act as though the trait you are trying to influence is already one of the person’s outstanding characteristics.
- Dale Carnegie
Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We’ll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and attract great people into the company. I’m very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish.
- Steve Ballmer
the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19
- James C. Collins
I try to create businesses that I think are not hurtful.
- Russell Simmons
The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.
- Peter Drucker
Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.
- Oprah Winfrey
The battle is all over except the ‘shouting’ when one knows what is wanted and has made up his mind to get it, whatever the price may be.
- Napoleon Hill
Despite the recent volatility of the stock market, economic and political confidence still prevails in Hong Kong.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?
- Dale Carnegie
mejor mamá que usted puede ser. Posiblemente, yo nunca seré el mejor pastor del mundo. Quizá no seré el mejor esposo ni el mejor padre, pero he decidido ser lo mejor que yo puedo ser y no me sentiré mal conmigo. Si otra persona puede hacer lo que hago mejor que yo, que bueno, yo no estoy en una competencia ni me estoy comparando con nadie. A mi manera de pensar, ¡yo soy el mejor! Y sé que estoy haciendo lo mejor que puedo. Eso es lo que nos enseña la Escritura. Dice: Así que, cada uno someta a prueba su propia obra…
- Joel Olsteen
The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.
- Zig Ziglar
In line with the objective to diversify the business of your Group, Henderson Cyber was established to focus on businesses in the telecommunications and information technology fields.
- Lee Shau Kee
Poke the box How do computer programmers learn their art? Is there a step-by-step process that guarantees you’ll get good? All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer or it might be your boss. It’s a puzzle, one that can be solved in only one way—by poking.
- Seth Godin
The Italians live well. They have problems, like all countries, but they are well-dressed, the women are pretty.
- Francois Pinault
To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.
- Peter Drucker
In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.
- Winston Churchill
When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered.
- Carlos Slim Helu
1. Why is it foolish to launch a new business with millions of dollars in TV ads?2. Are the market leaders in every industry more vulnerable to sudden successes by the competition than ever before?3. Should book publishers issue the paperback edition of a book before the hardcover?4. What’s the single most important asset a company can create—and what is the simple thing that can kill it?5. Every ad needs to do one of two things to succeed…yet most ads do neither. What’s the right strategy?6. Does the Net create a dynamic that fundamentally changes the way everything is marketed?7. How can every business…big and small…use ideavirus marketing to succeed?
- Seth Godin
Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.
- George Soros
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.
- Henry Ford
Of course people are getting smarter nowadays, they are letting lawyers instead of their conscience be their guides.
- Will Rogers
There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
- Peter Drucker
To all of us comes that moment in life when we are literally tapped on the shoulder to do a very special thing unique to ourselves and our talents. What a pity if that moment finds us unprepared.
- Winston Churchill
Darwin Smith stands as a classic example of what we came to call a Level 5 leader—an individual who blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will.
- James C. Collins
Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that everything changes except the law of change. He said: You cannot step in the same river twice. The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?
- Dale Carnegie
For those already successful, money can become a controlling factor in life and make you a slave to it. One way to avoid that – Philanthropy.
- Lee Shau Kee
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
- Winston Churchill
Sometimes put the idea away…
- Jack Dorsey
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they’ve succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
- Ben Horowitz
Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.
- Jack Welch
The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.
- Larry Ellison
Always try to learn from other peoples mistakes, not your own – It is much cheaper that way!
- Donald Trump
You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.
- Seth Godin
You can change everything about your business by changing your thinking about your business.
- Zig Ziglar
Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it… that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.
- Dale Carnegie
The question you should be asking isn’t, What do I want? or What are my goals? but What would excite me?
- Timothy Ferriss
