Notable Quotables

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

- Elon Musk

The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.

- Peter Drucker

In the old days, Hong Kong was undeveloped, coming from a low base. Now it is on a high base, making it difficult to earn high multiples. We will certainly diversify out of Hong Kong and out of property. [On being asked where?] I don’t know. I haven’t found it yet.

- Lee Shau Kee

I’m not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody’s throat: ‘You’re going to do it my way.’ I’d rather show by example and live my life and have people say, ‘You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He’s got peace and joy, and he seems content.’

- Joel Olsteen

I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. I do not read management or economics.

- Peter Drucker

When one person yells the other should listen. When two people yell, there’s no communication.

- Dale Carnegie

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

- Warren Buffett

Velocity and drive comes from your desire to achieve.

- Jim Cathcart

It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.

- Larry Ellison

Today is life – the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.

- Dale Carnegie

The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.

- Walt Disney

The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense.

- John C. Maxwell

It’s pretty chilly by southern California standards.

- Ed Clark

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

I am not the smartest, but I surround myself with competent people.

- Henry Ford

Don’t sling mud at others or soon you will find yourself in a deeper hole than when you started.

- Clay Clark

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

- Jack London

Only by believing in and looking for secrets could you see beyond the convention to an opportunity hidden in plain sight.

- Peter Thiel

Power should be reserved for weightlifting and boats, and leadership really involves responsibility.

- Herb Kelleher

Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.

- Bill Gates

The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.

- Oprah Winfrey

It is the people who control the Government, not the Government the people.

- Winston Churchill

A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see and who sees before others see.

- Leroy Eimes

I can’t afford to be indifferent to politics, but I don’t have personal ambitions.

- Vagit Alekperov

As bad as your situation may be, someone else always has it worse than you.

- George Foreman

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

- Dale Carnegie

Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.

- Wang Jianlin

We’d love to be involved with the creation of something very special, something quite large and something quite exciting.

- Richard Branson

If you want to reap financial blessings, you have to sow financially.

- Joel Olsteen

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

- Steve Wozniak

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

- Peter Drucker

Despite incessant dissappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o’ clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day, six days per week for six consecutive weeks, until late in the afternoon. The streets were so hot and hard that he grew footsore from pacing them. His perseverance surely owed something to his desire to end his reliance upon his fickle father. At one point, Bill (his father) suggested that if John didn’t find work he might have to return to the country; the thought of such dependence upon his father made a cold chill run down his spine, Rockefeller later said. Because he approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self-pity, he could stare down discouragement. I was working every day at my business –the business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this everyday. He was a confirmed exponent of positive thinking. With almost thirty thousand inhabitants, Cleveland was a boom town that would have thrilled any young man avid for business experience. It had drawn many transplants from New England who had brought along the Puritan mores and Yankee trading culture of their old hometowns. While the streets were largely unpaved and the town lacked a sewage system, Cleveland was expanding rapidly, with immigrants pouring in from Germany and England as well as the Eastern seaboard. The plenty if the Midwest passed through the commercial crossroads of the Western Reserve: coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, iron ore from around Lake Superior, salt from Michigan, grain and corn from the plains states. As a port on Lake Erie and the Ohio Canal, Clevelend was a natural hub for transportation networks. When the Cleveland Colombus and Cincinatti Railroad arrived in 1951, it created excellent opportunities for transport by both water and rail, and nobody would more brilliantly exploit these options than John D. Rockefeller. For all the thriving waterfront commerce, the job prospects were momentarily bleak. No one wanted a boy, and very few showed any overwhelming anxiety to talk with me on the subject, said Rockefeller. When he exhausted his list he simply started over from the top and visited several firms two or three times. Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.Then, on the morning of September 26th 1855, he walked into the offices of Hewitt & Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers on Mervin Street. He was interviewed by Henry B. Tuttle, the junior partner, who needed help with his books and asked him to return after lunch. Ecstatic, Rockefeller walked with restraint from the office, but when he got downstairs and rounded the corner he skipped down the street in pure joy. Even as an elderly man, he a saw the moment as endowed with high drama: All my future seemed to hinge on that day: and I often tremble when I ask myself the question: What if I had not got the job?In a fever of anxiety, Rockefeller awaited until the noonday meal was over, then returned to the office, where he was interviewed by senior partner Iasacc L. Newton. Owner of a good deal of Cleveland real estate and a mighty capitalist indeed. After scutinizing the boy’s penmanship, he clared we’ll give you a chance. They were evidently in urgent need of an assistant bookkeeper, since they told Rockefeller to hang up his coat and go straight to work without any mention of wages. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for an adolescent to serve an unpaid apprenticeship, and it was three months before John received his first humble retroactive pay. For the rest of his life he would honor September 26th as JOB DAY and celebrate it with more genuine brio than his birthday. One is tempted to say that his real life began on that day, that he was born again in business as he would be in the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. All the latent dynamism that had been dormant during his country youth would now quicken into robust, startling life in the business world. He was finally liberated from Big Bill (his father), the endless flight from town to town, the whole crazy upside-down world of his boyhood.

- Ron Chernow

I believe you should have a world where you’ve got to license something at a fair price. There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone. I wish Apple would use them and could use them, and I don’t know if Samsung would stop us.

- Steve Wozniak

I am wired like a CEO and care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers even more than that. That’s always been my competitive advantage.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The factory has programmed that adventurous impulse out of us. The economic imperative of the last century has been to avoid risk, avoid change, and most of all, avoid exploration and the new. An efficient factory fears change because change means retooling and risk and a blip in productivity. Sure, we’ll put up with change if we have to, and welcome the predictable incremental change of productivity improvement, but please leave us alone when it comes to the word “bold.” Avoiding risk worked then but doesn’t work now. Now “what’s next?” is in fact the driving force for individuals and for organizations. Ever onward, ever faster.

- Seth Godin

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.

- Peter Thiel

Well, we have to provide the world’s best schools. We certainly don’t have them, but that’s our objective.

- Michael Bloomberg

How Many Marriages Would Be Better If the Husband and the Wife Clearly Understood That They’re On the Same Side?

- Zig Ziglar

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

- Elon Musk

Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows.

- Reed Hastings

If you can dream it, then you can achieve it. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

At the start of any business, keeping the cash flowing in is the entrepreneur’s most IMPORTANT JOB.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.

- Peter Thiel

Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.

- Ben Horowitz

The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.

- Larry Page

You can’t build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.

- Rupert Murdoch

I encourage active skepticism – when people are being skeptical because they’re trying to identify the best course of action. They’re trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.

- Timothy Ferriss

When you marry operating excellence with innovation, you multiply the value of your creativity.

- James C. Collins

Don’t romance Wall Street. You don’t want investors who are only concerned about the quarter, or who are working on their exit strategy from day one. You want shareholders to own you forever. If we have no trading at all, I consider that a tremendous accomplishment.

- Warren Buffett

If you wish to build a powerful personal network, branch out. Build a diverse network of professional contacts that includes people that don’t look like you, sound like you, speak like you or have your background, education or history. The only thing they should have in common with you and the other people in your network is that they should be really good at what they do. Create a personal network like that, and you’ll have a network that can help you succeed at anything.

- Ivan Misner

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

- Peter Drucker

The thing about hip-hop is that it’s from the underground, ideas from the underbelly, from people who have mostly been locked out, who have not been recognized.

- Russell Simmons

Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.

- James C. Collins

Every morning brings new potential, but if you dwell on the misfortunes of the day before, you tend to overlook tremendous opportunities.

- Harvey Mackay

Shaw once remarked: If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.

- Dale Carnegie

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft

- Bill Gates

The entrepreneur builds an enterprise, the technician builds a job.

- Michael Gerber

Lo que una persona diga de ti no define quién eres. Su opinión de ti no determina tu dignidad propia. Deja que eso te resbale como si fuera agua sobre el plumaje de un pato. Esa persona tiene todo el derecho a tener una opinión, y tú tienes todo el derecho a pasarla por alto.

- Joel Olsteen

I built a steel plant from the grassroots, so I learned all the nuts and bolts. When there was a problem, I would be able to guide them, though I am not a technical person.

- Lakshmi Mittal

Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.

- Dale Carnegie

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

We’ve been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all, to prefer fitting in with the right people, the people with economic power. Now it’s your turn to stand up and stand out.

- Seth Godin

I loved couriers. You had this transfer of physical information happening throughout the city and the world. Someone picking up the package, putting it in a bag, going somewhere, taking it out of the bag, giving it to someone else. I thought that was so cool. I wanted to map it, to see that flow on a big screen.

- Jack Dorsey

At the point when adding people into the company feels like more work than the work that you can offload to the new employees, the defensive lineman has run around you and you probably need to start giving ground grudgingly.

- Ben Horowitz

You have to be responsible when you’re running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.

- Ben Horowitz

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we will fall, but ‘when.’ There are no exceptions.

- John C. Maxwell

Don’t worry about failure, you only have to be right once.

- Drew Houston

I think we are not serious about attacking the long-term debt problem, and that’s one of the things that he’s going to have to find a way to get on the agenda.

- Michael Bloomberg

The onset of global financial turmoil in the second half of 2008 and the resultant wait-and-see attitude adopted by some homebuyers put the property market into the doldrums, with a general decline in both transaction volume and transacted prices.

- Lee Shau Kee

I don’t want to be too critical of what other people do, but when people go back to do the same thing that they did, I’m completely confused. I’m like, ‘Didn’t you make that movie already?’ I’ve been very fortunate, and I’m well taken care of, so the least I can do is try to go forward.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I don’t feel under-taxed in any way at all.

- Jack Welch

It is exactly because we are a city that embraces freedom, that welcomes everyone and encourages their dreams, that New York remains on the front lines in the war on terror.

- Michael Bloomberg

Cupcakes The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They’re cooks, not chefs. A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs.

- Seth Godin

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

I guess the worst moment I ever had in business was the fear that Southwest Airlines wouldn’t get off the ground.

- Herb Kelleher

We modeled our employee stock ownership plan after Sam’s, and it worked well for us.

- Bernie Marcus

This presents more of a challenge, given our current size and market leadership.

- John Chambers

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

- Ben Horowitz

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy’s aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

- Winston Churchill

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

- Elon Musk

Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.

- Sergey Brin

I was taken by the power that savoring a simple cup of coffee can have to connect people and create community.

- Howard Schultz

Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.

- John F. Kennedy

MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.

- Reid Hoffman

The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves.

- Peter Drucker

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription