Notable Quotables

You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.

- Elon Musk

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

- Ben Horowitz

Yes, they broke the law, but we can’t deport them. Let’s get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it – they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need.

- Michael Bloomberg

The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization…. Such war-making weapons should be developed – but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation.

- Thomas Edison

The three Rs in educationare reading, writing and arithmetic. Without these basic skills, learning becomes almost impossible. In a similar way, business starts with a relationship. You are then judged by the results. Rewards spring from the results.

- Jack Nadel

At the end of the day, effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible. They give people a clear sense of the direction to profitability and the inspiration to feel they are part of something big and important.

- Jack Welch

Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.

- Peter Thiel

Creating a sense of urgency around change initiatives is especially hard to do. Human nature seems to be hardwired to adhor change, and people will do everything in their power to resist it. I once heard this explained to another Pepsi consultant. His philosophy was that in order to drive change, you need to create what he called, the burning platform. This burning-platform image was an oil rig in the North Sea that has caught fire and the only way to save yourself is to jump into the frigid water and swim to the lifeboat. You know the jump might kill you, but you jump anyway, not because you think it might be a good idea, but because you had no choice. That’s creating a sense of urgency.

- David Novak

[On his son Matt dying in 2004 in a scuba diving accident] It aged me much faster than anything you can imagine…

- Phil Knight

Christopher Colombus’ big mistake was that he was looking for a trade route to China, and accidentally bumped into America, the richest, most powerful country in the world.

- Robert Kiyosaki

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

- Bill Gates

There is a winner in you. You were created to be successful, to accomplish your goals, to leave your mark on this generation. You have greatness in you. The key is to get it out.

- Joel Olsteen

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.

- Napoleon Hill

On many long journeys have I gone. And waited, too, for others to return from journeys of their own. Some return; some are broken; some come back so different only their names remain.

- Yoda

I believe that God’s dream is that we be successful in our careers, and that we be able to send our kids to college. I don’t mean that everyone is going to be rich, and I preach a lot on blooming where you’re planted. But I don’t have the mindset that money is a bad thing.

- Joel Olsteen

Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

- Jack Nadel

I’m killing two birds at once, so to speak. Animal-based food kills people. This way, by going vegan… we get healthy and save animals. I’m being selfish, too, because if I can get my employees healthier, we cut down on sick days and gain more productivity.

- Stephen Wynn

[On only having 4-6 hours for sleep in guiding two companies in June 2011.] Most people have major positions at companies and they’re also raising families. They have two year olds. I have it easy.

- Jack Dorsey

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

- Henry Ford

How much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes?

- Peter Thiel

I broke into an industry that was completely money-focused. Nobody was paying attention to the women and thinking about how these undergarments felt, or how they fit…All of a sudden I showed up and charged more for one pair than anybody can comprehendand women lined up in droves to buy them. I think I left the industry in show, but I really believed that we needed to make it better not cheaper.

- Sara Blakely

The first key factor, I believe, is unity. If a family is not united, how then can we unite our colleagues? If we don’t love our brothers or our family, how then can we go ahead to love our colleagues. So our tradition really is about the human factor and talents, and we are dependent on the human factor. Therefore we have this corporate slogan – The markets of the world can belong to our corporation, and so can the world’s foremost human talents; The markets of the world belongs to us, and so are the world’s vast resources of raw materials. Similarly, if we can gain access to it, then the world’s financial funding belongs to us as well. Therefore, of foremost importance is access to human talents. Of course, a slogan is only something that we speak of. Of greater importance, is to truly have access to human talents. Towards that purpose, we must first be united and possess love. Our family is very united. And for the sake of the company, we innovated – we introduced western-style (corporate) culture into our company 30 years ago.

- Dhanin Chearavanont

Living in the moment brings you a sense of reverence for all of life’s blessings.

- Oprah Winfrey

Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.

- Timothy Ferriss

Disneyland is the star, everything else is in the supporting role.

- Walt Disney

The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions… If people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I learned about why startups should train their people when I worked at Netscape. People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense.

- Ben Horowitz

There is no such thing in the world as luck. There never was a man who could go out in the morning and find a purse full of gold in the street to-day, and another to-morrow, and so on, day after day: He may do so once in his life; but so far as mere luck is concerned, he is as liable to lose it as to find it.

- P.T. Barnum

Everybody has equal opportunity, and I think that is true for everything.

- Mukesh Ambani

The Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.

- Michael Gerber

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.

- Bill Gates

It’s not one of the enduring mysteries of all time. A motivated employee treats the customer well. A customer is happy so they’ll keep coming back, which pleases the shareholder. It’s just the way it works.

- Herb Kelleher

No one has any idea what’s next… the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it’s delaying the recovery.

- Stephen Wynn

A man may be poor; he may have nothing at all except his labour to sell; he may be a manual worker for a weekly wage, but in a free commonwealth he must enjoy as good a right as any lord, or prelate, or capitalist in the country to the integrity of his own political convictions.

- Winston Churchill

The prizes of life are at the end of each journey, not near the beginning, and it is not given to me to know how many steps are necessary in order to reach my goal. Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner.

- Og Mandino

The words Think and Thank are inscribed in many of the Cromwellian churches of England. These words ought to be inscribed in our hearts, too: Think and Thank. Think of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.

- Dale Carnegie

I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.

- Henry Ford

Cherish each hour of this day for it can never return.

- Og Mandino

The thing for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I will see that you get it.

- Dale Carnegie

At your next sales meeting with 20 people, three will take home the money of 17 others. Is it luck, hard work and a great attitude? Or it is persuasive skill – understanding the transactional dynamics of the sales process?

- Jerry Vass

We’re really going after truly creating sustainability of a disease-free state, creating a complete system for managing cancer patients for life, so that you can manage from onset of disease all the way through.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

My son is now an ‘entrepreneur.’ That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job

- Ted Turner

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

- Napoleon Hill

I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know ‘No, he couldn’t have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.’

- Steve Wozniak

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

- Thomas Edison

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios… The idea that you can actually predict what’s going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

- George Soros

I’m in two modes when I’m on Lanai: In engineering mode, I’m trying to find the right place for the reservoir and the desalination plant, and looking at designs for new hotel rooms. The rest of the time, I’m in decompression mode. I’m on Hulopoe Beach, going for a swim, or on my paddleboard surrounded by 100 spinner dolphins.

- Larry Ellison

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don’t start, you never get a chance.

- Seth Godin

You have to learn to follow your heart. You can’t let other people pressure you into being something that you’re not. If you want God’s favor in your life, you must be the person He made you to be, not the person your boss wants you to be, not even the person your parents or your husband wants you to be. You can’t let outside expectations keep you from following your own heart.

- Joel Olsteen

I love technology, and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.

- Steve Martin

You never achieve success unless you like what you are doing.

- Dale Carnegie

Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.

- James C. Collins

On every occasion, we were able to rely on our unique qualities – resourcefulness, perseverance, diligence and passion for excellence – to rise above our difficulties.

- Cheng Yu-tung

In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, ‘That was the Internet Age.’ And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.

- Reed Hastings

Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.

- John C. Maxwell

I came over from Wal-Mart to help set up Sam’s. Since we were patterned after PRICE CLUBS, sometimes we copied them without exactly knowing what we were doing. We were bringing a West Coast idea to the Midwest, and we didn’t know how it would be received. I remember one idea that didn’t transfer too well. Price Club had a huge stack of wine in front of its stores. We bought the same amound for our stores in the Midwest and we learned the hard way that Midwesterners aren’t exactly wine drinkers. (on competition)

- Ron Loveles

What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

- Peter Thiel

Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.

- Howard Schultz

I’m not in business to make money for the other guy. I’m in the business to make money for myself.

- Sheldon Adelson

Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.

- Peter Thiel

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

- Rupert Murdoch

I’ve changed my will to show my concern for animal rights.

- Stephen Wynn

You are going to fire Mark Hurd and hire Leo? What I said at the time was that this was the best idea since the Apple board fired Steve Jobs. Really brilliant.

- Larry Ellison

Trump has been very influential in helping me expand by vision. Sometimes I talk to Donald two or three times a day, and he’s taught me many things. The best thing was a story he tells me about buying a building. When he built Trump Tower he also bought the rights to use the Tiffany name on the building. It was gonna be Tiffany Tower. He late father said, Yeah right. When you change your name to Tiffany, you call it Tiffany Tower. But for now, you call it Trump. Over a period of years whenever he was in trouble, his name and his promotion of himself as a brand are what saved him. I keep that lesson in mind. I remember how connecting Def Comedy Jam to Def Jam records helped both entities – associating HBO with an established hip-hop brand helped get the show on the air, while linking the label to a hot TV show helped the label survive a cold period.

- Russell Simmons

Chinese people, young people, they don’t go shopping a lot in department stores. All department store guys hate me. They say business is bad because of Jack.

- Jack Ma

Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.

- Steve Ballmer

I like football, but I think this is a very personal matter. I don’t see any negatives for some Russian rich man to buy a football club.

- Viktor Vekselberg

When I was 17 or 18 I wanted to become a wine expert, and my parents wouldn’t let me drink. So I was devastated. All I could do was read, and I read and I read. And I’d read something like, you know, ‘Subtle hints of cassis.’

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.

- John C. Maxwell

The real problem when working with a consultant, a therapist or a coach isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The real problem is that we don’t want to change our mind.

- Seth Godin

On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better.

- Reed Hastings

We are seeing the beginning of things. Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second.

- Reed Hastings

God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days. Why should you and I?

- Dale Carnegie

When sales people don’t know what to do, they talk. The ordinary salesperson vomits the presentation onto the Buyer’s desktop.

- Jerry Vass

If you start today to do the right thing, you are already a success even if it doesn’t show yet.

- John C. Maxwell

If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments.

- Zig Ziglar

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

- Walt Disney

Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.

- Phil Knight

Names are the sweetest, most important sound in any language.

- Dale Carnegie

Mr. Carnegie’s Master Mind group consisted of a staff of approximately 50 men, with whom he surrounded himself, for the definiteness purpose of manufacturing and marketing steel. He attributed his entire fortune to the POWER he accumulated through this Master Mind…Great POWER CAN BE ACCUMULATED THROUGH NO OTHER PRINCIPLE.

- Napoleon Hill

A number of people in the United States, almost everyone, is using plastic cards to pay for things, but it’s extremely difficult to accept these cards. So let’s make it’s easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.

- Jack Dorsey

If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

- James C. Collins

There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one.

- Winston Churchill

Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best.

- John C. Maxwell

We ride roughshod over the feelings of others, getting our own way, finding fault, issuing threats, criticising a child or an employee in front of others, without even considering the hurt to the other person’s pride. Whereas a few minutes’ thought, a considerate word or two, a genuine understanding of the other person’s attitude, would go so far toward alleviating the sting!

- Dale Carnegie

After Scour, I started a company called Red Swoosh. The idea was to take those litigants who sued us for a huge amount of money and turn them into customers with the same technology. I wanted to get them to pay me. It was a revenge business.

- Travis Kalanick

I don’t know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

- Henry Ford

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