Notable Quotables

Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.

- Bill Gates

I was not an easy student, and I had to apply myself diligently to prepare my lessons, said Rockefeller, who described himself accurately as reliable but not brilliant.

- John D. Rockefeller

The fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain.

- Zig Ziglar

Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.

- Og Mandino

Try to build bridges of understanding. Don’t build higher barriers of misunderstanding.

- Dale Carnegie

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

- Richard Branson

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is “creative destruction.

- Peter Drucker

Niklas Zennstroem has a thorough background as a successful entrepreneur with extensive expertise in areas such as IT and online.

- Stefan Persson

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

- Reed Hastings

The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.

- George Soros

Success means doing the best we can with what we have. 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.

- Zig Ziglar

I have many children, as you seek you may find that this the last one till he must die before he must reach the becoming of mankind. Many men have failed but i have surpassed their expectation of being a Jedi master.

- Yoda

I’m pretty good at sticking to what I know. You don’t see me social commentating on health-care or presidential debates. I talk about what I know because I’m petrified of being wrong.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to gain mighty triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither gain much nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory or defeat.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember Life is too short to be little.

- Dale Carnegie

Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.

- P.T. Barnum

As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous businesspeople for advice.

- Timothy Ferriss

We’ve seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we’re seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.

- Sergey Brin

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

- Warren Buffett

It’s the little things that are vital. Little things make big things happen.

- John Wooden

The onset of global financial turmoil in the second half of 2008 and the resultant wait-and-see attitude adopted by some homebuyers put the property market into the doldrums, with a general decline in both transaction volume and transacted prices.

- Lee Shau Kee

I’ve found that many of the greatest ideas surface in bars because that’s where many people cultivate inspiration.

- Herb Kelleher

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

In a climate of tight budgets, reduced workforces and stiff competition, internal training can be a great substitute for costly offsite workshops and conferences.

- Harvey Mackay

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m a catalyst for change. You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.

- Rupert Murdoch

What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

God will lead you from where you are right now to where He wants to you to be, if you’ll let Him.

- George Foreman

I’m honest enough to say I don’t know everything. You know, I don’t. I don’t understand all of God. I don’t understand, you know, some kind of why bad things happen.

- Joel Olsteen

I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.

- Jerry Seinfeld

On engagement, we’re already seeing that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users than desktop users. They’re more likely to use Facebook six or seven days of the week.

- Mark Zuckerberg

We thought we ought to put that in because it’s the truth but the (like-for-like) number even with those factors taken into account is still very disappointing.

- Simon Wolfson

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.

- Elon Musk

Don’t be impatient. It’s not over until God says it’s over.

- Joel Olsteen

Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.

- Dale Carnegie

By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.

- Lee Shau Kee

Ranking among the greatest Christmas movie classics, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ tells a beautiful story about the priceless value of relationships.

- John C. Maxwell

To properly value a business, you also have to discount those future cash flows to their present worth, since a given amount of money today is worth more than the same amount in the future.

- Peter Thiel

I don’t want people in China to have deep pockets but shallow minds.

- Jack Ma

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are making these changes at a time when we are beginning to see signs that our business is stabilizing.

- John Chambers

I feel good about being able to take bluegrass on to television like ‘Letterman’ and ‘The View,’ and I’ve heard nice things about being able to do that. I really haven’t felt any negativity toward me or my music.

- Steve Martin

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

- Peter Drucker

The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn’t have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want.

- Steve Wozniak

When an employee asks why the company does things a certain way, and you can explain the logical reason, then the employee knows what she’s doing is valid.

- Harvey Mackay

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked

- Warren Buffett

I’ll mix a lot of things. I’ll wear a Temperley dress with flip flops, or I might be in head-to-toe Gucci and have on a ring that I got from a gumball machine for 50 cents.

- Sara Blakely

I love comedy. That’s what got me into the arts. I don’t even know how to categorize myself anymore.

- Steve Martin

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

- Stephen King

Victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.

- Og Mandino

Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. … We found that they don’t predict anything.

- Laszlo Bock

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

You may live or work around a bunch of weeds, but don’t let that stop you from blooming. Realize that your environment does not prevent you from being happy. Some people spend all their time trying to pull up all the weeds. Meanwhile, they miss much of their lives. Don’t worry about things you can’t change. You can’t change the traffic in the morning. You can’t fix everybody at work. You can’t make all your family members serve God. But you shouldn’t let that keep you from being happy. Bloom anyway and focus on the things that you can change. You can change your own attitude. You can choose to be happy right where you are.

- Joel Olsteen

What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.

- Warren Buffett

If you’re using first-class land for biofuels, then you’re competing with the growing of food. And so you’re actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

- Bill Gates

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

- Elon Musk

I took up an offer for me to lose 30 pounds in 30 days. It worked. I lost 30 days!

- Zig Ziglar

Vision without execution is just hallucination.

- Henry Ford

When one person yells the other should listen. When two people yell, there’s no communication.

- Dale Carnegie

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

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?

- Michael Bloomberg

Allow yourself to get on the same side of the desk and solve the problems together.

- Jack Nadel

In the game of life, before you get anything out, you must put something in!

- Zig Ziglar

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

- Bill Gates

When people get at each other’s throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.

- Ray Dalio

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

You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That’s how you know you’re still alive.

- Jerry Seinfeld

It sounds awful, but a crisis rarely ends without blood on the floor. That’s not easy or pleasant. But sadly, it is often necessary so the company can move forward again.

- Jack Welch

China has set its cultural industries as pillar industries.

- Wang Jianlin

I could’ve just walked away but I never could have forgiven myself to allow Starbucks to drift into mediocrity or not be relevant. I just couldn’t be a bystander.

- Howard Schultz

No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

- John F. Kennedy

The customer reaction to Dell going private has been a lot more positive than I would have ever imagined. Customers see it as – ‘You don’t have to be distracted. Now you can totally focus on your business.’ So they see it as a positive.

- Michael Dell

Remain close to government and away from politics. It means deal more with the authorities. And less with individuals.

- Wang Jianlin

I don’t want any more concentration camps for animals that are cruelly treated, force-fed to fatten themselves up for our consumption.

- Stephen Wynn

Cupcakes The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They’re cooks, not chefs. A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs.

- Seth Godin

I think people instinctively know that their job is to give service and that they are part of a community. It had a great impact on me when my father walked the picket lines and I walked with him during the civil rights movement.

- Russell Simmons

We were always trying to look for people who could help us beyond what we were doing.

- Phil Knight

Focus on your people – Without employees and customers, your’re going nowwhere.

- David Green

The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize employees, family members and friends, and still not correct the situation that has been condemned.

- Dale Carnegie

Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.

- Zig Ziglar

I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.

- Elon Musk

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose . . . only then will you learn the game.

- Zig Ziglar

Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.

- Rupert Murdoch

It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11.

- Michael Bloomberg

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

- Jack London

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