Notable Quotables

Dont count the things you do, do the things that count.

- Zig Ziglar

You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth.

- Winston Churchill

There is nothing either good or bad,” said Shakespeare, but thinking makes it so.

- Dale Carnegie

It’s not enough to use information for something”—it needs to be immediate and important.

- Timothy Ferriss

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Put everything you’ve got into what you’re doing. Be totally focused–nothing should be haphazard.

- Donald Trump

I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.

- Winston Churchill

The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by.

- Seth Godin

I had already started the learning process by organizing a tour of some of the best companies out there to find out exactly what it was that made them great. I went back to the Partners’ Council and asked them to help me study the best practices of the best companies we could find. We would then use then findings to strengthen our company.

- David Novak

Art is what we call…the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the …eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.

- Seth Godin

So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.

- Peter Drucker

[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

I was fascinated with jeans, because you can impress your life upon the jeans you wear. The way you sit imprints on the jeans.

- Jack Dorsey

Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.

- Zig Ziglar

We had been kicked out of one bank… The second, it was touch and go…

- Phil Knight

The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.

- Ben Horowitz

Victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop fighting.

- Napoleon Hill

Mr Churchill, to what do you attribute your success in life? Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down

- Winston Churchill

How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world?

- Reed Hastings

IN A NUTSHELL SIX WAYS TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE YOU PRINCIPLE 1 Become genuinely interested in other people. PRINCIPLE 2 Smile. PRINCIPLE 3 Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. PRINCIPLE 4 Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. PRINCIPLE 5 Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. PRINCIPLE 6 Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.

- Dale Carnegie

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

- Winston Churchill

How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?

- Seth Godin

When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

- Walt Disney

Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you’re doing. It doesn’t know what you know.

- Larry Page

[In January 2011] We have built the simplest way to accept credit cards. It’s a little tiny device that we give away for free, and you just download some softwares from the app store and plug it in to your mobile phone or iPad and suddenly you can take credit cards. So if you’re a tax accountant or a lawyer or doctor or even a hair stylist, you can now accept credit cards.

- Jack Dorsey

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.

- Mark Twain

At the end of the day, the Irvine Co. is slowly being transformed. Our long-term goal is to transform what was once an agricultural company to a development company, and to that, the next, final step is to create a large real estate investment company.

- Donald Bren

Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.

- Peter Thiel

There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

- Timothy Ferriss

Do you know how many companies have wanted me to do an energy drink for them because I named my book ‘Crush It!’? It might be fun one day, but right now I think it would undermine the personal brand I’ve built.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

- Dale Carnegie

You can’t fault government for seizing that opportunity. But it has an impact on Barbados’ current account deficit and it does bring with it attended risks. And, therefore, you have to ask whether or not the tourism business that is going to be generated from the publicity around the cricket matches will be sustained after the cricket matches are over.

- John Chambers

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

- Mark Twain

Today, we’ve begun to make the extraordinary historic films of the National Archives available to the world for the first time online. Students and researchers whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon.

- Sergey Brin

But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1.

- Peter Thiel

Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.

- Bill Gates

Look, I’m a passionate entrepreneur. I’m like fire and brimstone sometimes. And so there are times when I’ll go—I’ll get too into the weeds and too into the debate, because I’m so passionate about it.

- Travis Kalanick

The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.

- Peter Thiel

Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that.

- Steve Ballmer

The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.

- Elon Musk

We are not in the business of iron ore. Whatever captive iron ore sources we have, we use it to make steel.

- Lakshmi Mittal

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

- Mark Twain

There’s a time that may come in an organization where leading by influence is not enough. When things are not going the way they need to go, there’s a time when one has to step up… to set the organization back on the right direction.

- Abigail Johnson

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

- Dale Carnegie

You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.

- Joel Olsteen

In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it’s disruptive and it’s a problem.

- Ray Dalio

It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

- Peter Thiel

Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.

- James C. Collins

Modern society is based on a modern idea: get the work done by replaceable cogs, by individuals programmed to do what they’re told, follow instructions and work cheap. The attraction of this system is evident by how easily ordinary organizations replace ordinary employees, and how eagerly schools indoctrinate their students.

- Seth Godin

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

- Jeff Bezos

I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.

- Jeff Bezos

If you cannot persuade people to do things, you simply will not be a success because you are not an island unto yourself. Everything in life is about persuading people to do what you want them to do.

- David Robinson

As a general thing, I have not ‘duped the world’ nor attempted to do so… I have generally given people the worth of their money twice told.

- P.T. Barnum

You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.

- Peter Thiel

When you make a TV show, they always say you’re a guest in someone’s home. Online, you’re a guest in someone’s face. So that’s why I try to make it sound and look and feel very inviting and attractive, because I know that I’m in your face.

- Jerry Seinfeld

My first large-scale community development opportunity was the formation of the Mission Viejo Co. – a partnership with the O’Neill Family, who owned Rancho Mission Viejo. As the young president of the company, I had the responsibility for master planning, master building and implementing the new community’s development plans.

- Donald Bren

The saving of money is solely a matter of habit. It is literally true that man, through the Law of Habit, shapes his own personality. Through repetition, any act indulged in a few times becomes a habit, and the mind appears to be nothing more than a mass of motivating forces growing out of our daily habits. When once fixed in the mind a habit voluntarily impels one to action.

- Napoleon Hill

I believe that uncertainty is really my spirit’s way of whispering, I’m in flux. I can’t decide for you. Something is off-balance here.

- Oprah Winfrey

The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative.

- Peter Thiel

Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.

- Peter Thiel

I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.

- Elon Musk

We’d like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers.

- Seth Godin

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

Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Friend, there’s no greater investment in life than in being a people builder. Relationships are more important than our accomplishments.

- Joel Olsteen

We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere… can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.

- Elon Musk

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.

- Jack London

It is expected that Mainland China’s entry to the World Trade Organisation will materialise in the near future and the country will see further growth in its economy unfolding at a faster pace.

- Lee Shau Kee

This can only be accomplished by people who live, breathe, eat and sleep what they are doing…. [I am] associated with a large group of knowledgeable, dedicated [people] who eat, breathe, and sleep the world of aeronautics…. Man’s objective should be opportunity for greater accomplishment and greater service. The greatest pleasure life has to offer is the satisfaction that flows from… participating in a difficult and constructive undertaking.

- James C. Collins

I was the only westerner to succeed in a place that’s like a toilet, and you always come out of a toilet with a smell.

- David Reuben

In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

- Ben Horowitz

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Differentiation (rating and evaluating people) Develops Great Organizations. Differentiation is hard, anybody who finds it easy doesn’t belong in the organization, and anyone who can’t do it falls in the same category…It is important for companies to continually remove the bottom 10 percent of their employees anually.

- Jack Welch

The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble…We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.

- Warren Buffett

I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.

- Elon Musk

The dangers of unchecked bureauracy are a constant thorn in the CEO’s side.

- Jack Welch

You cannot get into business for the fashion of it.

- Azim Premji

MONOPOLY. Tesla started with a tiny submarket that it could dominate: the market for high-end electric sports cars. Since the first Roadster rolled off the production line in 2008, Tesla’s sold only about 3,000 of them, but at $109,000 apiece that’s not trivial. Starting small allowed Tesla to undertake the necessary R&D to build the slightly less expensive Model S, and now Tesla owns the luxury electric sedan market, too. They sold more than 20,000 sedans in 2013 and now Tesla is in prime position to expand to broader markets in the future.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.

- Steve Martin

Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be.

- Sam Walton

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

- Bill Cosby

In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching.

- Bill Gates

My wife thinks she’s better than me at puzzles. I haven’t given in on that one yet.

- Bill Gates

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