Notable Quotables

Frequently I’ll be interviewing with somebody or talking and in about 15 minutes they’ll interrupt me mid-stream and say, ‘Oh my God, you’re nothing like I’d thought you’d be.’

- Larry Ellison

People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are terrible at it. There are two reasons: 1. Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no Harajuku Moment. 2. There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers.

- Timothy Ferriss

The ultimate goal for a business owner is to build a company that he or she can one day sell, continue to scale, or even own passively. Most business owners reach for growth by working harder and personally trying to produce more. This is a flawed model that at best will lead to only moderate growth. At worst this strategy can literally put your entire company at risk.

- Jeff Hoffman

Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth…. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

- Viktor E. Frankl

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves – their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

- Peter Drucker

Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

- Dale Carnegie

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.

- Peter Thiel

I had a disc giving me a lot of trouble, and I had four surgeries. Then I had a staph infection, so they had to open me up five times in four months… It was in the bottom of my back, the same incision. They should have put a zipper on it.

- Stephen Wynn

Never be bothered by what people say, as long as you know in your heart you are right.

- Dale Carnegie

When I’m bored or tired of being blonde, I’ll throw on a wig. It’s a lot less of a permanent way to change your look, and I have about 10 – all different colors, shapes, bobs, long hair, short, feathered.

- Sara Blakely

What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away.

- Jack Dorsey

Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.

- Tadashi Yanai

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

A false transaction using my own people to buy the flat? I’ll make a bet with you. For every $10,000 you put down, I’ll wager $1 million.

- Lee Shau Kee

Esta es la clave: las únicas promesas que se avivarán en su vida y terminarán convirtiéndose en realidad son las promesas en las que usted se levanta y dice: Sí, eso es para mí”. Tiene que entrar en acuerdo con Dios y permitir que eso eche raíz.

- Joel Olsteen

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

- Bill Gates

The 1990s have a good image. We tend to remember them as a prosperous, optimistic decade that happened to end with the internet boom and bust. But many of those years were not as cheerful as our nostalgia holds. We’ve long since forgotten the global context for the 18 months of dot-com mania at decade’s end.

- Peter Thiel

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

The most stable companies have strong leaders at every level of the organization. The only way to develop such widespread leadership is to make developing leaders a part of your culture. That is a strong part of Coca-Cola’s legacy.

- John Maxwell

Not every Apple product makes a big enough difference to me to get instantly, although many do.

- Steve Wozniak

If you are satisfied with the results you are now getting, why change? If you are not satisfied, why not experiment?

- Dale Carnegie

The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.

- Larry Ellison

Projections are just bullshit. They’re just guesses.

- Jason Fried

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

- Elon Musk

More than trends, consumers need functionality. Everything needs an element of fashion, but that’s more like a spice.

- Tadashi Yanai

Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.

- Jack Welch

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.

- Peter Thiel

Social and digital media is a bullet train, and that bullet train is not coming home.

- Howard Schultz

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

- Ben Horowitz

The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.

- Dale Carnegie

A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.

- James C. Collins

You’ve got to take a big jump to make it. You’ve got to have great big balls.

- Forrest Ray

You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.

- Timothy Ferriss

The path of least resistence is the path of the loser.

- H.G. Wells

We are always listening to ideas presented by our customers and in an effort to keep up with their demands, we are adding those quality improvements to Atlanta Motor Speedway. The changes we have planned are a direct result of fan input and are aimed at giving our fans options they currently don’t have.

- Ed Clark

Without passion, you don’t have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

- Donald Trump

Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.

- Oprah Winfrey

The debt limits have to come down. The whole world of debt has to be changed as far as this country is concerned. We have to create jobs and we have to create them rapidly because if we don’t things are just going to head in a direction that’s going to be almost impossible to recover from.

- Donald Trump

I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t do the natural thing, the impulsive thing. That is usually wrong.

- Dale Carnegie

The boss would be present at the beginning of each session, laying out the rationale for the Work-Out. He or she would also commit to two things: to give an on-the-spot yes or no to 75 percent of the recommendations that came out of the session, and to resolve the remaining 25 percent within thirty days. The boss would then disappear until the end of the session, so as not to stifle open discussion, returning only at the end to make good on his or her promise.

- Jack Welch

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

- John C. Maxwell

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

Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

- Steve Jobs

I’m so optimistic, I’d go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take the tartar sauce with me.

- Zig Ziglar

Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be. If we do our best, we are a success.

- Zig Ziglar

If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.

- Peter Thiel

Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That’s not possible on $1 a day.

- Bill Gates

It is true that integrity alone won’t make you a leader, but without integrity you will never be one.

- Zig Ziglar

That is what every successful person loves: the game. The chance for self-expression. The chance to prove his or her worth, to excel, to win. That is what makes foot-races, and hog-calling, and pie-eating contests. The desire to excel. The desire for a feeling of importance.

- Dale Carnegie

Movies always are open to being remade because times change so much, and the tempo of movies changes. I think of it like a James Bond. They can have different actors play the same role… I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘We want to remake ‘The Jerk’ with so and so.’ And I say, ‘Fine.’ It just doesn’t bother me. It’s an honor actually.

- Steve Martin

Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.

- Winston Churchill

If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.

- Richard Branson

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

- Henry Ford

In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history.

- Michael Dell

If a job doesn’t excite you on some level—just because of the stuff of it—don’t settle.

- Jack Welch

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

- Winston Churchill

Over the past ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.

- Ben Horowitz

We are consolidating our position as one of the leading technology companies in the automotive industry. Research and development expenditure of another 6 percent of our sales or around €2.1 billion is fueling our capacity for innovation. There are very few companies in the industry that are able to operate in these dimensions.

- Elmar Degenhart

We cannot start over, but we can begin now, and make a new beginning.

- Zig Ziglar

Ultimately, broadcasters and advertisers have to change the way they do business or they run the risk of linear TV becoming obsolete.

- Charles Ergen

The young athlete who aspires to greatness, generally speaking, learns a number of things from several different coaches. The first one taught him the fundamentals; the second one instilled discipline in him and taught him more of the techniques that must be mastered to excel.

- Zig Ziglar

We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.

- Napoleon Hill

When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‘Oh, it must be so hard.’ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You have enough people against you… be for yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

- Warren Buffett

I have no interest in going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. I’m just not that kind of dude.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

God accepts you. God approves you. And He has something better in store.

- Joel Olsteen

I’ve known entrepreneurs who were not great salespeople, or didn’t know how to code, or were not particularly charismatic leaders. But I don’t know of any entrepreneurs who have achieved any level of success without persistence and determination.

- Harvey Mackay

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

- Elon Musk

One of the cornerstones of what I believe will be the future is wave after wave of applications.

- John Chambers

No man has a right to expect to succeed in life unless he understands his business, and nobody can understand his business thoroughly unless he learns it by personal application and experience.

- P.T. Barnum

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.

- Bill Gates

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.

- Bill Gates

You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.

- Thomas J Watson

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.

- Walt Disney

When I first discovered in the early 1980s the Italian espresso bars in my trip to Italy, the vision was to re-create that for America – a third place that had not existed before. Starbucks re-created that in America in our own image; a place to go other than home or work. We also created an industry that did not exist: specialty coffee.

- Howard Schultz

Japan’s biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.

- Tadashi Yanai

We need to, you know, restore people. We need to show mercy. I mean, because as much mercy as you show people, that’s the mercy you’re going to be receiving.

- Joel Olsteen

That was a great day in my life! Your time is too valuable to worry about pleasing everyone else or making them happy. I know people who spend more time worrying about what others think about them than they do focusing on their own dreams and goals. You’ve got to get free from that.

- Joel Olsteen

Little phrases such as ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ ‘Would you be so kind as to –?’ ‘Won’t you please?’ ‘Would you mind?’ ‘Thank you’ – little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life – and incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

- Dale Carnegie

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

- John F. Kennedy

To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.

- Timothy Ferriss

Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.

- Harvey Mackay

The seed of a bamboo tree is planted, fertilized and watered. Nothing happens for the first year. There´s no sign of growth. Not even a hint. The same thing happens – or doesn´t happen – the second year. And then the third year. The tree is carefully watered and fertilized each year, but nothing shows. No growth. No anything. For eight years it can continue. Eight years! Then – after the eight years of fertilizing and watering have passed, with nothing to show for it – the bamboo tree suddently sprouts and grows thirty feet in three months!

- Zig Ziglar

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