Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.
- Sam Walton
Notable Quotables
I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.
- Mark Zuckerberg
If you don’t love what you’re doing with unbridled passion and enthusiasm, you’re not going to succeed when you hit obstacles.
- Howard Schultz
The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.
- Michael Gerber
Good leaders know that one secret to success is to staff their weaknesses.
- John Maxwell
Same problem as every Hollywood studio: how can you reliably produce a constant stream of popular entertainment for a fickle audience? (Nobody knows.)
- Peter Thiel
Many businesses forget that a crucial part of cash flow is managing your own bill paying. Make sure you pay your bills promptly. Ask for extended terms up front. After you have paid timely for two or three months, ask for additional extensions on your payable terms. A supplier will usually extend credit for 30 to 90 days to a good customer.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Video is emerging as the key strategic application in the service provider triple play bundle of consumer entertainment, communication and online services.
- John Chambers
A man has no right to occupy another man’s time unnecessarily.
- John D. Rockefeller
If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.
- Henry Ford
We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.
- Thomas Edison
Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don’t show up. They want to be missed when they’re gone.
- Seth Godin
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
- Ray Kroc
I wasn’t satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement.
- Donald Trump
Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.
- Winston Churchill
lasting transformations from good to great follow a general pattern of buildup followed by breakthrough.
- James C. Collins
What’s your vision for the future of your follicles?
- Clay Clark
Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Our investment in more than 100 projects in China’s property, infrastructure and other sectors makes us one of the country’s largest investors.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
- Winston Churchill
Where there is no vision, there is no hope.
- George Washington Carver
I’ve always thought if we don’t want to enforce laws on the books, we should remove them from the books. But when you have laws, you breed contempt if you don’t enforce them.
- Michael Bloomberg
[On January 30, 1964] With a hearty ichi ban Blue Ribbon Sports got off the ground on Monday with an order for 300 pairs of shoes.
- Phil Knight
You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.
- Zig Ziglar
Relatively few people should start companies.
- Reid Hoffman
Many people are unhappy and are not experiencing life to its fullest because they’ve closed their hearts to compassion, they are motivated by only what they want and what they think they need. They rarely do anything for anybody else unless they have an ulterior goal in mind. They are self-involved and self-centered.
- Joel Olsteen
A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every business. You can energize people around the message.
- Jack Welch
Perhaps the most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.
- Ben Horowitz
I’ve taken those pharmacists and asked them to reach out to doctors. Doctors still misprescribe very often. They leave gaps with care. People with asthma, they don’t take their inhalers, they wait until they’re sick, and by then, it’s too late. Now we’re already running up the bills and going to emergency rooms. We’re using our pharmacist to do the things they were educated to do, not to count pills. That’s not where the value is.
- George Paz
If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.
- Napoleon Hill
Our minds become magnetized with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds and these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.
- Napoleon Hill
If you believe in quality, you can’t just tell everybody We believe in quality! You’ve got to pay bonuses based on quality. You’ve got to let everyone in the organization know that they are being judged on quality.
- Jack Welch
We have a very high churn rate, but as soon as we turn on email marketing to our user base, people will come back.” Yes, of course. The reason that people leave our service and don’t come back is that we have not been sending them enough spam. That makes total sense to me, too.
- Ben Horowitz
Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.
- Donald Trump
Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.
- Yoda
You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.
- Elon Musk
Use what you have to get what you want.
- Jack Nadel
A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.
- Joel Olsteen
It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.
- Peter Drucker
Luck plays a role in business but whether you succeed or fail depends on many other factors. I haven’t really had a failure.
- Lui Che Woo
Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, ‘What’s in it for me?
- Brian Tracy
Starbucks has a role and a meaningful relationship with people that is not only about the coffee.
- Howard Schultz
You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once.
- Oprah Winfrey
You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.
- Jack Ma
This the real world, homie, school finished They done stole your dreams, you dunno who did it.
- Kanye West
I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed…You only have to be right once…I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all.
- Mark Cuban
Personal discipline, when it becomes a way of life in our personal, family, and career lives, will enable us to do some incredible things.
- Zig Ziglar
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
We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen.
- Seth Godin
For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the products. But now we understand the most important thing we do is market the product… Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.
- Phil Knight
In the 1960s, if you introduced a new product to America, 90% of the people who viewed it for the first time believed in the corporate promise. Then 40 years later if you performed the same exercise, less than 10% of the public believed it was true. The fracturing of trust is based on the fact that the consumer has been let down.
- Howard Schultz
There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.
- Jack Welch
Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.
- P.T. Barnum
If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he’ll make up for what he lacks. And that proved true nine times out of ten. It was one way we were able to grow so fast.
- Sam Walton
When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
- Elon Musk
My strength is programming. I also think my biggest strength is simplification. That’s what I love doing.
- Jack Dorsey
With communication technology in general, there’s a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world’s entire population using one communication technology, that’s a big deal. It’s beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it’s a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.
- Ben Horowitz
[That was the case Wednesday night, when Cisco executives talked about results for the fiscal second quarter (which closed on Jan. 26). Chambers and chief financial officer Larry Carter spoke only about the next quarter, when revenue growth from the second fiscal quarter is expected to be nil or in the low single digits.] Our visibility is still very limited, … If there’s one lesson we’ve learned over the past year, it’s how quickly things can change.
- John Chambers
Don’t water your weeds.
- Harvey Mackay
For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them” (Matthew 25:29).
- Peter Thiel
Now that we have run out of money we have to think.
- Winston Churchill
My two primary areas of focus have been open-space conservation and education, and I expect those to remain my priorities in the future. The Irvine open space and parklands provide serenity and balance to our unique Orange County lifestyle.
- Donald Bren
I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.
- Jeff Bezos
Weak desires bring weak results.
- Napoleon Hill
Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
- Elon Musk
Decisiveness is a characteristic of high performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all.
- Brian Tracy
When you become a leader success is all about growing others.
- Jack Welch
It’s only lonely at the top if you forget all the people you met along the way and fail to acknowledge their contributions to your success.
- Harvey Mackay
I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.
- Larry Page
Being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.
- Peter Thiel
I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.
- Richard Branson
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.
- Henry Ford
When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Forty-five years ago, when I was 18, I came to San Francisco by boat and took two weeks to get here. I had a great impression. I think San Francisco is the welcoming gate for people from Asia.
- Tadashi Yanai
Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.
- Henry Ford
To reach your full potential, you have to set goals that will stretch you.
- Zig Ziglar
Every company must deal decisively with people who don’t perform satisfactorily….Great people, not great strategies are what made it all work (GE).
- Jack Welch
I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.
- Jeff Bezos
God will not pour fresh, creative ideas and blessing into old attitudes.
- Joel Olsteen
Life is bigger than processes and overflows and dwarfs them.
- Dale Carnegie
Once you hit the critical mass, you can’t push it much further. Otherwise the meaning gets fuzzy and confused, and before long, the brand is on the way out.
- Phil Knight
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
- Dale Carnegie
I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are.
- Ray Dalio
Never forget, the real secret of giving advice is this: Once you’ve given it, don’t concern yourself with whether it is followed or not, and refrain from saying ‘I told you so.’
- Harvey Mackay
Don’t lose youself on the way to the top.
- Jack Welch
When SAP, and, specifically Hasso Plattner, said they’re going to build this in-memory database and compete with Oracle, I said. God, get me the name of that pharmacist, they must be on drugs.
- Larry Ellison
The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.
- Bill Gates
All human beings are the same. In the United States, people come from all over the world, all races, all backgrounds. And they’re all doing what they want, many scoring huge successes. When I saw that, I became more open. It freed my soul.
- Masayoshi Son
Manufacture, don’t just trade. There’s money in manufacturing even though it is capital intensive.
- Aliko Dangote
Don’t buy preground coffee.
- Howard Schultz
Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.
- Dale Carnegie
Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.
- Steve Jobs
I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.
- Jeff Bezos
Last I looked – and I’m not a candidate – but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It’s most states are winners take all.
- Michael Bloomberg
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The Chinese market is a very good expansion opportunity for us, and we will continue looking to buy stakes and make acquisitions.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.
- John C. Maxwell
If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that’s not going to promote healthiness.
- Larry Page
Winning ‘Motor Trend’ Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.
- Elon Musk
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
