Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike”, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
One incident preserved by General Ismay in an apocryphal and somewhat lively form may be allowed to lighten the narrative. His orderly, a Royal Marine, was shown the sights of Moscow by one of the Intourist guides. “This,” said the Russian, “is the Eden Hotel, formerly Ribbentrop Hotel. Here is Churchill Street, formerly Hitler Street. Here is the Beaverbrook railway station, formerly Goering railway station. Will you have a cigarette, comrade?” The Marine replied, “Thank you, comrade, formerly bastard!” This tale, though jocular, illustrates none the less the strange atmosphere of these meetings.
- Winston Churchill
There are only two kinds of employees that I’ve run across in 30 years. There are ones that get results, and ones that make excuses. If you’re in that second camp, you’re not going to like Dish.
- Charles Ergen
The Hindus are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.
- Joel Olsteen
In life, you can blame a lot of people and you can wallow in self-pity, or you can pick yourself up and say, ‘Listen, I have to be responsible for myself.’
- Howard Schultz
We’re responsible for the creation of the PC industry. The whole idea of compatible machines and lots of software.. that’s something we brought to computing. And so it’s a responsibility for us to make sure that things like security don’t get in the way of that dream.
- Bill Gates
If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another…so they follow.
- Seth Godin
Our international success started out first because we became the No. 1 casual wear brand in our home market of Japan. Then, we set up stores in the world’s major fashion centers of New York, Paris and London.
- Tadashi Yanai
Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be.
- Sam Walton
I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
- Thomas Edison
When companies fail, or fail to grow, it’s almost always because they don’t invest in the people, the systems, and the processes they need.
- Howard Schultz
Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] … by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks … to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly.
- Winston Churchill
If you had to boil down the Wal-Mart system to one single idea, it would porbably be communication, because it is one of the real keys to our success…Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
- Sam Walton
I wanted to be a tailor to craft products.
- Jack Dorsey
My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
- Michael Gerber
I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun.
- Reed Hastings
My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.
- Bill Gates
I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.
- Oprah Winfrey
The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.
- George Soros
No effort has been spared in ensuring the best designs for all our projects.
- Lee Shau Kee
I’ve changed my will to show my concern for animal rights.
- Stephen Wynn
Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.
- Warren Buffett
American Dream – and it says that you should graduate from high school, graduate from college, get married, find a job with good benefits, have sex with your spouse two times per week, buy a home with a mortgage, get a pet, go on vacation two times per year, have two kids, invest in mutual funds and IRAs, recycle when possible, and aim to retire early in your mid-fifties to early sixties, if you are lucky. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s kind of hard to be passionate about that American Dream.
- Clay Clark
Every leader’s potential is determined by the people closest to him. No matter what I did with that staff, they would never be able to take the organization to the place we needed to go.
- Napoleon Hill
If David our CEO, devotes so much of his time to this, then all this stuff about teamwork and learning how to be a great leader must be pretty important.
- David Novak
Self-discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think you can’t control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.
- Napoleon Hill
We’d love to be involved with the creation of something very special, something quite large and something quite exciting.
- Richard Branson
Failure is a great teacher, and I have been its student on more than one occasion. – CEO David Novak of Yum! Brands
- David Novak
We remain confident about the market opportunity ahead of us over the next three to five years.
- John Chambers
I am an expert in Higher Level Math. You + God= Enough
- Zig Ziglar
Most people have ‘one way’ brains—they acquire information and do nothing. Guerillas have ‘two way’ brains—they obtain relevant information and act on it.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.
- Elon Musk
I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.
- Walt Disney
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.
- Zig Ziglar
If you’re not one or two in the market, you don’t make money. The market leaders make the money.
- Jack Welch
I believe life is a series of near misses. A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see And pursuing that vision.
- Howard Schultz
Sometimes put the idea away…
- Jack Dorsey
If you can’t make 40% on your money in Russia, you’re a fool.
- Simon Reuben
We are not in the business of iron ore. Whatever captive iron ore sources we have, we use it to make steel.
- Lakshmi Mittal
To Be Success In Life Forget The Problems That You Face…But Don’t Forget The Lessons That Those Problems Taught To..
- Harvey Mackay
My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.
- Elon Musk
The very important thing you should have is patience.
- Jack Ma
When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.
- Dale Carnegie
I think, for years, people have been pushed down by religion, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they’ve been shown a God that you can’t measure up to.
- Joel Olsteen
Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.
- Bill Gates
There are men in the world who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as others from success.
- Winston Churchill
Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
- Steve Jobs
You may be at a crossroads in your life. You may have issues to deal with; people you need to forgive. You can go one of the two ways. You can ignore what you now know to be true and keep burying that bitterness in your life, pushing it deeper and allowing it to poison and contaminate you and those around you. Or you can make a much better choice by getting it out in the open and asking God to help you to totally forgive and let it all go.
- Joel Olsteen
One of my favorite perks was picking out an issue and doing what I called a deep dive. It’s spotting a challenge where you think you can make a difference…one that looks like it would be fun, and then throwing the weight of your position behind it. Some might justifiably call it meddling….I followed up on all of them with a passion and a mania that often veered toward the lunatic fringe…To make the initiatives work, it took a passionate all-consuming commitment from the top. Beyond passion, there was alot of rigor…Making initiates successful is all about focus and passionate commitment. The drumbeat must be relentlessness. Every leadership action must demonstrate total committment to the initiative….I was an outrageous champion of everything that we did from our early need to face reality and change the culture to our major initiatives that reshaped the company. Whenever I had an idea or message that I wanted to drive into the organization, I could never say it enough. I repeated it over and over, at every meeting and review for years, until I could almost gag on the words.
- Jack Welch
Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done. That would be you.
- Seth Godin
I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the site, and we’ve funded ever since by putting ads on the site.
- Mark Zuckerberg
I didn’t used to wear a watch. Now I have a SPOT watch, which I wear all the time.
- Bill Gates
We live well below our means. We wear inexpensive suits and drive American-made cars. Only a minority of us drive the current-model-year automobile. Only a minority ever lease our motor vehicles.
- Thomas J Stanley
We’ve got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.
- Bill Gates
I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that’s a big deal. And if you’re going to be a leader – if you’re a leader and you’re the smartest guy in the world – in the room, you’ve got real problems.
- Jack Welch
That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
- Steve Jobs
Like technical debt, management debt comes in too many different forms to elaborate entirely, but a few salient examples will help explain the concept. Here are three of the more popular types among startups: 1. Putting two in the box 2. Overcompensating a key employee, because she gets another job offer 3. No performance management or employee feedback process
- Ben Horowitz
A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.
- Henry Ford
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.
- Winston Churchill
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
- Winston Churchill
Growth inside fuels growth outside.
- John C. Maxwell
I want the services to look and sound like the Grammys. It’s not showy, but we represent God, and it should be first class.
- Joel Olsteen
When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good, you will not, hmmmm?
- Yoda
All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.
- Winston Churchill
If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Visibility remains limited, and this should come as no surprise, given that our customers’ visibility is limited.
- John Chambers
At the start of any business, keeping the cash flowing in is the entrepreneur’s most IMPORTANT JOB.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Don’t buy preground coffee.
- Howard Schultz
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
- Sam Walton
I was not strong enough to defeat him. Like his master before him, be destroyed, he must.
- Yoda
Kids instinctively know – although they will argue to the contrary – that they really are not mature enough to make good decisions on some important issues.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m not a fan of the cursing method of management.
- David Robinson
Believe that you will succeed — and you will.
- Dale Carnegie
School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.
- Reed Hastings
A good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.
- Thomas Edison
Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.
- Warren Buffett
The record results for the third quarter once again demonstrate the ability of GE’s diverse mix of leading global businesses to deliver top-line growth, increased margins and strong cash generation.
- Jack Welch
Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.
- Bill Gates
You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself.
- Napoleon Hill
Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.
- Sam Walton
This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.
- Clayton M. Christensen
No matter what’s happening, choose to be happy. Don’t focus on what’s wrong. Find something positive in your life. Thank God for the small things.
- Joel Olsteen
Our culture works hard to prevent change.
- Seth Godin
Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.
- W. Clement Stone
To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.
- Winston Churchill
I come back to the same thing: We’ve got the greatest pipeline in the company’s history in the next 12 months, and we’ve had the most amazing financial results possible over the last five years, and we’re predicting being back at double-digit revenue growth in fiscal year ’06.
- Steve Ballmer
I attract a crowd, not because I’m an extrovert or I’m over the top or I’m oozing with charisma. It’s because I care.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.
- Bill Gates
Learn to do common things uncommonly well, we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.
- George Washington Carver
A goal is a dream with a deadline.
- Napoleon Hill
The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- Winston Churchill
And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.
- Seth Godin
Effort is grossly underrated.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The response to the Starbucks brand has been phenomenal in our international markets.
- Howard Schultz
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.
- Mark Zuckerberg
…The greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.
- Seth Godin
You can be passionate about anything.
- Jerry Seinfeld
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
- Steve Wozniak
Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.
- Reid Hoffman
My favorite museums are things like the Frick Museum in New York and the Huntington Hartford in Pasadena where it’s someone’s home that you walk through.
- Larry Ellison





