Notable Quotables

A magnificent blueprint, a loyal team and a well-coordinated organization… the same applies from ruling a country to maintaining a family.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

- Winston Churchill

It enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that’s where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it’s where the apps are.

- Peter Thiel

Starting means you’re going to finish. If it doesn’t ship, you’ve failed. You haven’t poked the box if the box doesn’t realize it’s been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it’s merely a hobby.

- Seth Godin

What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

- Clayton M. Christensen

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

- Andrew Carnegie

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

- John C. Maxwell

My personal opinion is that I’m in the media too much. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.

- Viktor Vekselberg

You want your customers to value your service.

- Jeff Bezos

If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.

- Thomas Edison

We think we’re going to be especially strong in platform where we have our two platform brands: our database brand is the Oracle Database 12c, and our programming language brand is this thing called Java.

- Larry Ellison

God is a good God, and He gives good things to his children. No matter who has denigrated you or how much pain you’ve experienced in life, no matter how many setbacks you have suffered, you cannot allow yourself to accept that as the way life is supposed to be. No, God has better things in store for you. You must reprogram your mind with God’s word; change that negative, defeated self-image, and start seeing yourself as winning, coming out on top. Start seeing that marriage as restored. See your business as flourishing. See your children as enjoying the good things of God. You must see it through your eyes of faith, and then it will begin to happen.

- Joel Olsteen

If you need 15 minutes in the sun to trigger a melanin response, 15 minutes is your MED for tanning. More than 15 minutes is redundant and will just result in burning and a forced break from the beach. During this forced break from the beach, let’s assume one week, someone else who heeded his natural 15-minute MED will be able to fit in four more tanning sessions. He is four shades darker, whereas you have returned to your pale pre-beach self.

- Timothy Ferriss

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

- Albert Einstein

Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials).

- Peter Thiel

The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now.

- Zig Ziglar

Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.

- Larry Ellison

Don’t just accept whatever comes your way in life. You were born to win, you were born for greatness, you were created to be a champion in life.

- Joel Olsteen

I enjoy the competition and the process of learning as we compete. The whole thing is just fascinating. I don’t know what I’ll do when I retire. When I go sailing, I look around … anyone want to race? I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.

- Larry Ellison

One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life.

- Napoleon Hill

A good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.

- Thomas Edison

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

- Warren Buffett

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

- Richard Branson

Brands mature over time, like a marriage. The bond you feel with your spouse is different than when you first met each other. Excitement and discovery are replaced by comfort and depth.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

- Ben Horowitz

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win — you’re still a rat.

- Lily Tomlin

Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying.

- Peter Thiel

To be a champion, you have to learn to handle stress and pressure. But if you’ve prepared mentally and physically, you don’t have to worry.

- Harvey Mackay

[In June 2011] We’re focused on building a product and a business. Going public is an instrument and tool to help sustain the company. In the future, there may be an IPO, but I don’t know what the timing is.

- Jack Dorsey

Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.

- Zig Ziglar

The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.

- Timothy Ferriss

You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.

- Ben Horowitz

I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.

- Walt Disney

Do not look like you are playing the fiddle while Rome is burning….stay focussed – Paraphrased from

- David Novak

If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.

- Elon Musk

I don’t like to look back, and I’m always worried about the next thing rather than resting on the laurels or the degradations of the last thing.

- Steve Martin

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.

- Seth Godin

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

- Napoleon Hill

Ethical decisions ensure that everyone’s best interests are protected. When in doubt, don’t.

- Harvey Mackay

India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy.

- John Chambers

The secret to being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.

- Seth Godin

Google’s motto—“Don’t be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it’s also characteristic of a kind of business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence.

- Peter Thiel

I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

- Bill Gates

After putting economics aside, I found that there were two primary reasons why people quit: They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving. They weren’t learning anything: The company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills.

- Ben Horowitz

I absolutely don’t have $20 billion. But I’d love to, right?

- Jack Ma

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

- Bill Gates

My father left me with a clear sense that the media was something different.

- Rupert Murdoch

Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new.

- Og Mandino

Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We’ll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and attract great people into the company. I’m very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish.

- Steve Ballmer

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

- Herbert Simon

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That’s a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

- Ben Horowitz

My big focus is China and OPEC and all of these countries that are just absolutely destroying the United States.

- Donald Trump

Visibility remains limited, and this should come as no surprise, given that our customers’ visibility is limited.

- John Chambers

Every dream I’ve ever had in life has come true ten times over.

- Steve Wozniak

Well, it’s very clear that the Arab population is rising because they’d like to have a say in the running of their affairs, running of their government, and this is very legitimate.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature, Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon’s unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.

- Walt Disney

The definition of commerce is the activity between buyers and sellers.

- Jack Dorsey

At the start of any business, keeping the cash flowing in is the entrepreneur’s most IMPORTANT JOB.

- Robert Kiyosaki

You can make positive deposits in your own economy every day by reading and listening to powerful, positive, life-changing content and by associating with encouraging and hope-building people.

- Zig Ziglar

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It’s the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

- Elon Musk

In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren’t management books out there that could help me.

- Ben Horowitz

In fact, stories only magnify the need to have something remarkable (and honest) to say.

- Seth Godin

To lead a meaningful life, one must build trust with others. To enjoy peace, a nation must win the confidence and support of its people. To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Every time you resist temptation you are winning for your children.

- Joel Olsteen

The richest people in the world look for and build networks, everyone else looks for work.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.

- Zig Ziglar

Of course people are getting smarter nowadays, they are letting lawyers instead of their conscience be their guides.

- Will Rogers

When Steve Jobs was at NeXT, he was really getting his head together and taking control and becoming the person that, when he came back to Apple, you know, he was ready to really run the company and keep control of things and watch what was being done and develop new products secretly that were really incredibly great.

- Steve Wozniak

My advice for an entrepreneur just starting out is to differentiate yourself. Why are you different? What’s important about you? Why does the customer need you?

- Sara Blakely

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

- Steve Jobs

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, knowing him was like drinking it.

- Winston Churchill

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

- Walt Disney

Personally, I just hope they (the LA Lakers) suck forever.

- Mark Cuban

The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That’s a bittersweet ending.

- Timothy Ferriss

I don’t think that ambition should not be in the dictionary of entrepreneurs. But our ambition should be realistic. You have to realise that you can’t do everything.

- Mukesh Ambani

Leadership, very simply, is about two things: 1. Truth and trust. 2. Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter.

- Jack Welch

Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer.

- Seth Godin

Japan has only 100m people. Asia has 4bn. At least one-third, maybe nearly half, will become middle class, and this is a big opportunity for Japanese businessmen.

- Tadashi Yanai

When you have got a thing where you want, it is a good thing to leave it where it is.

- Winston Churchill

A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

- Peter Thiel

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

- Peter Thiel

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

- Jeff Bezos

There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.

- Jack Welch

Okay, let’s talk about cartoon labels for half a second – some people think anything with a dog or a car or a colorful alien is garbage, which is not true. Look at Big Moose Red. It’s, like, a $6 wine with a cheesy label, and it’s actually a solid wine.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

- Bill Gates

This has been a very positive test for Kawasaki.

- Yoda

Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.

- Jack Ma

The bulk of the universities are about teaching kids.

- Bill Gates

m reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States – for the century, at least.

- Elon Musk

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