Notable Quotables

Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.

- Peter Thiel

You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated.

- James C. Collins

Those who keep the peace of their inner selves in the midst of the tumult of the modern city are immune from nervous diseases.

- Dale Carnegie

Being excellent is hard. So when you have something hard to do, remember you are being excellent. Do you want to be remembered for being good or great?

- Lee Cockerell

One reason to buy a watch (or a book) is because you want to possess it, show it off, give it to your grandchildren. Holding a book is a luxury, one for which you pay a premium.

- Seth Godin

So what we do every Monday is review the whole business…I put out an agenda – 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.

- Steve Jobs

Does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done in this assignment? The answer: it depends. In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.

- Clayton M. Christensen

The reason you might choose to embrace the artist within you now is that this is the path to (cue the ironic music) security.

- Seth Godin

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.

- Winston Churchill

Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I’d try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, ‘This is the end.’ I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.

- Rupert Murdoch

Often the best way to develop workers – when you are sure they have the character and think they have the ability – is to take them to a deep place, throw them in and make them sink or swim.

- John D. Rockefeller

[On signing up Michael Jordan in 1984 when he was just 21 years old] We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture.

- Phil Knight

When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.

- Bill Gates

For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the products. But now we understand the most important thing we do is market the product… Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.

- Phil Knight

Being first is more important to me [than earning money]. I have so much money. Whatever money is, it’s just a method of keeping score now. I mean, I certainly don’t need more money

- Larry Ellison

We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’

- Warren Buffett

The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.

- Peter Thiel

I can’t read a computer screen and never use a calculator. It’s all in my head and by hand.

- Simon Reuben

The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.

- Peter Drucker

TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE, THE PRODUCTS, AND THE PROFITS—IN THAT ORDER.

- Ben Horowitz

I’ve seen executives improve their performance and skill sets, I’ve never seen one lose the support of the organization and then regain it.

- Ben Horowitz

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

- Mark Twain

A movement is thrilling. It’s the work of many people, all connected, all seeking something better.

- Seth Godin

I’m not speaking defeat into my future. I’m not speaking failure over my life. I will turn it around and speak favor into my future. I will declare, I’m blessed. I’m strong. I’m healthy. This will be a great year.” When you do that, you are blessing your future.

- Joel Olsteen

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

You must practically educate yourself, regardless of your accessibility to formal education.

- Abraham Lincoln

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

- Peter Drucker

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

- Peter Drucker

If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, you’ll never end up with a nag.

- Zig Ziglar

You read these management books that say, ‘These are the hard things about running a company.’ But those aren’t really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.

- Ben Horowitz

This is just going to be a great event and we have an outstanding speaker.

- Jack Taylor

Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.

- Ben Horowitz

Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

- Og Mandino

The future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed.

- William Gibson

Es interesante que cuando Jesús quiso animar a sus seguidores a expandir su visión, les recordó que no se echa vino nuevo en odres viejos”.2 Jesús estaba diciendo que no puedes tener una vida abundante con actitudes restringidas. Esa.

- Joel Olsteen

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

- Elon Musk

I could never have imagined that firing 67 people on national television would actually make me more popular, especially with the younger generation.

- Donald Trump

The Benefits are about the Buyer’s stuff – what your products or services do for Buyers. Do the Benefits make them feel better about life – give them power; make them sexier, prettier, richer, more comfortable or secure, smarter, more competitive? Do they save time, money, fear or hassle?

- Jerry Vass

You’ll never find a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

- Winston Churchill

I am a huge bull on this country. We will not have a double-dip recession at all. I see our businesses coming back almost across the board.

- Warren Buffett

We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.

- Walt Disney

When I was growing up, I always knew I’d be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence.

- Sergey Brin

[On working at Nike for 48 years] In those 48 years, I have never had a promotion. but it had its other benefits.

- Phil Knight

My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.

- Mark Zuckerberg

This I do know beyond any doubt, Regardless of what you are doing, if you PUMP LONG AND HARD ENOUGH and ENTHUSIASTICALLY ENOUGH, sooner or later the EFFORT will bring forth the REWARD.

- Zig Ziglar

The spread of online information isn’t just good for charities. It’s also good for donors. You can go to a site like Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits on their financial health as well as the amount of information they share about their work.

- Bill Gates

You may think there is a lot wrong with you, but there is also a lot right with you.

- Joel Olsteen

Restructuring a job usually means restructuring a score of jobs, moving people around, and upsetting everybody. There is one exception: the exceedingly rare, truly exceptional man for whose sake the rule should be broken.

- Peter Drucker

Proclaim this among the nations: Prepare war. Stir up the mighty men. Let all the warriors draw near. Let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, And your pruning hooks into spears. Let the weak say, I am strong.

- Joel 3:9

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it’s digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules – not just for governments but for private companies.

- Bill Gates

Time can be an ally or an enemy. What it becomes depends entirely upon you, your goals, and your determination to use every available minute.

- Zig Ziglar

Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts … genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation … the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality …though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]

- Winston Churchill

Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that’s what’s happening now.

- Reed Hastings

Regarding our links with the Russian government, Severstal is a private company with no government participation. We are answerable to our shareholders.

- Alexei Mordashov

Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do. It’s why Nike is Nike, it’s why Apple is Apple, it’s why Walt Disney built Disney World and it’s why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.

- Oprah Winfrey

I’ve traveled around the world, and what’s so revealing is that, despite the differences in culture, politics, language, how people dress, there is a universal feeling that we all want the same thing. We deeply want to be respected and appreciated for our differences.

- Howard Schultz

Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.

- Peter Thiel

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

- Bill Gates

Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.

- Ray Dalio

Maybe you’ve invested a lot of time, effort, money, emotion, and energy in a relationship; you did your best to make it work out. But for some reason, things got off course. And now you feel as though you have been robbed. When we focus on or disappointments, we stop God from ringing fresh new blessing into our lives.

- Joel Olsteen

As I get, I give. Giving as you get is critical. It has everything to do with being happy for yourself, and making others happy is the cause of making yourself happy, and it’s the cycle of giving and getting.

- Russell Simmons

Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization’s history. For some reason that simple truth has evaded everybody.

- Stephen Wynn

Having a personality of caring about people is important. You cant be a good leader unless you generally like people. That is how you bring out the best in them.

- Richard Branson

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

You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.

- John C. Maxwell

I would summarize the quarter as a solid quarter from a revenue and earnings per share perspective and a strong quarter from an orders perspective.

- John Chambers

The Starbucks customer and the Teavana customer are two very different customers, two different need states that are highly complimentary.

- Howard Schultz

If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.

- Elon Musk

In business, just the opposite is often true; silence means dissent. Have you ever been in a meeting where you sense there is obvious disagreement, but the disagreement never really gets put on the table? This what I call the Slow No’s.

- David Novak

In the short term, the market is a popularity contest. In the long term, the market is a weighing machine.

- Warren Buffett

At the margin, they’ll be biased to claim value in the near term, not help you create more in the future. That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided,

- Peter Thiel

For every sale you miss because you were too enthusiastic, you’ll miss a hundred because you weren’t enthusiastic enough.

- Zig Ziglar

Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

- John D. Rockefeller

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.

- Bill Gates

Through the wisdom of its government leaders and the entrepreneurship of its private sector, India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy, … Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.

- John Chambers

The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

- Ben Horowitz

In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive.

- Bill Gates

Man was designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness.

- Zig Ziglar

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.

- Aristotle

To remain a credible leader, I must always work first, hardest, and longest on changing myself. This is neither easy nor natural, but it is essential.

- John C. Maxwell

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it.

- Peter Thiel

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