Steve Jobs didn’t really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don’t deny that.
- Steve Wozniak
Notable Quotables
Never blindside an employee by firing them without warning.
- Clay Clark
When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.
- Larry Ellison
There is no sure path to success, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone.
- Timothy Ferriss
The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.
- Zig Ziglar
If something is expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
- Bill Gates
You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I define joy as a sustained sense of well-being and internal peace – a connection to what matters.
- Oprah Winfrey
If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.
- Richard Branson
Inability to Cooperate With Others.
- Napoleon Hill
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
- Dale Carnegie
Attitude, not Aptitude, determines Altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m a voracious reader.
- Howard Schultz
About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.
- Reed Hastings
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
I like definitive things.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Pay attention to those employees who respectfully ask why. They are demonstrating an interest in their jobs and exhibiting a curiosity that could eventually translate into leadership ability.
- Harvey Mackay
The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you’ve ever been able to create before.
- Seth Godin
The great thing is we’re going to have a lot of new facilities, where the others were 10 years old or older. That’s a plus for the fans. The new State Road 20 is going to open. That’s a huge addition for us, probably one of the biggest things that’s happened since we bought the track in 1990.
- Ed Clark
Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A well spent day brings happy sleep.
- Leonardo da Vinci
I DECLARE it is not too late to accomplish everything God has placed in my heart. I have not missed my window of opportunity. God has moments of favor in my future. He is preparing me right now because He is about to release a special grace to help me accomplish that dream. This is my time. This is my moment. I receive it.
- Joel Olsteen
When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew.
- Herb Kelleher
The lifeblood of job creation in America is small business, but they can’t get access to credit.
- Howard Schultz
HE RICH DON’T WORK FOR MONEY The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.
- Robert Kiyosaki
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
When men are fighting for their lives they are not often disposed to be complimentary to those who are trying to kill them.
- Winston Churchill
I think, for years, people have been pushed down by religion, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they’ve been shown a God that you can’t measure up to.
- Joel Olsteen
The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.
- Peter Drucker
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
- Winston Churchill
My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.
- Sara Blakely
In any new business, someone has to have a vision. You are as good as the people around you. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Identify your core community and go from there. Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to. In my experience it often takes as long as five years to make a business work. Partners can fail you. Staff may not execute properly. You could be too far ahead of the market. SO you have to be willing to hand in there and make it happen. From the founding of Phat Farm in 1992 until 1997, I lost money. By my account, I experienced $10 million in losses. But today Phat Farm is visible, it is imitated and it generates hundreds of millions of dollars. It took time, but good ideas often do need time to take off. Being an entrepreneur requires instinct, fortitude and the ability to accept that the world does not run on your schedule. Sometimes you just have to believe.
- Russell Simmons
That’s an issue dear to my heart, because I was born in the Soviet Union during the communist era.
- Sergey Brin
NO PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OR EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK PROCESS Your company now employs twenty-five people and you know that you should formalize the performance management process, but you don’t want to pay the price. You worry that doing so will make it feel like a “big company.” Moreover, you do not want your employees to be offended by the feedback, because you can’t afford to lose anyone right now. And people are happy, so why rock the boat? Why not take on a little management debt? The first noticeable payments will be due when somebody performs below expectations: CEO: “He was good when we hired him; what happened?” Manager: “He’s not doing the things that we need him to do.” CEO: “Did we clearly tell him that?” Manager: “Maybe not clearly . . .” However, the larger payment will be a silent tax. Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.
- Ben Horowitz
While a definitely optimistic future would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers.
- Peter Thiel
I’m a constant learner. You need to be a constant student because things change and you have to change and grow. And I emphasize the word ‘grow.’
- Zig Ziglar
Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you believe as I do that you were born to win, you’re going to have to find your fears and start facing them.
- Zig Ziglar
I was reading an article in the ‘New York Times;’ it talked about being in the zone, and being in the zone you’re so focused that time ceases to exist. It’s when you think, ‘Oh, I’ve been doing this for five hours and didn’t even know it.’ It’s the difference between hard work and going, ’12 o’clock, not moving.’
- Steve Martin
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
It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.
- Robert Kiyosaki
To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.
- Thomas Edison
I came from a Hindi medium school… the principal felt that I would not fit into an English medium college. Though I was top in my class in school, and I got admission in other colleges, but I really wanted to study in St. Xavier’s.
- Lakshmi Mittal
Witchcraft is one of the most baseless, absurd, disgusting and silly of all the humbugs.
- P.T. Barnum
People tend to over-weigh risks on a personal level. It’s one thing if you’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids to support, so that if you were to deviate from your job, well, how are you going to feed your family and pay the rent? That’s understandable, but let’s say you’re young and you’re just coming out of college, what are your risks? You’re not going to starve, certainly not in any kind of modern economy. It’s so easy to earn enough money just to live somewhere and eat food. Very easy to do. So I don’t know what they’re afraid of. Mostly afraid of failure, I think, but people should be less risk averse, when there’s not much at risk.
- Elon Musk
We are very happy to be reporting that our pro-forma earnings passed the $1 billion mark for the first time.
- John Chambers
You can always think of something like the Xbox 360 as a super set-top box that can do everything the set-top box does, but then have the graphics to do the games as well.
- Bill Gates
My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she’s at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn’t think it would be fair; plus, they didn’t have any interest anyway.
- Howard Schultz
High expectations are the key to everything.
- Sam Walton
You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.
- Bill Gates
Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, and the human.
- Seth Godin
The steel business is a local business. We do believe in the U.S. economy and would like to have a strong, balanced presence here.
- Alexei Mordashov
A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.
- Zig Ziglar
It is a hard thing to let go of mistakes we’ve made and sins. God wants us to do that because He knows the guilt and the condemnation will keep us from becoming who He has created us to be.
- Joel Olsteen
Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.
- Wang Jianlin
It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.
- Warren Buffett
You do not get what you want. You get what you negotiate.
- Harvey Mackay
God, I’m not going to look at what I don’t have. I’m looking unto you. I know in my weakness, you show up the strongest.
- Joel Olsteen
Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.
- James C. Collins
It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.
- Winston Churchill
God wants to bless us where we are.
- Joel Olsteen
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
- Ben Horowitz
There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
- Dale Carnegie
Life isn’t fair. It’s true, and you still have to deal with it. Whining about it rarely levels the playing field, but learning to rise above it is the ultimate reward.
- Harvey Mackay
Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We’ll break out of it. It takes time.
- Warren Buffett
Catering to a mass audience usually backfires. Instead the key thing is to stay in your lane, and if you are good enough and interesting enough, people move to you…If you never compromise, your core audience will come with you as you grow. Then you build on their loyalty and bring in other people.
- Russell Simmons
The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds like the worst. It sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I’d be super-duper bored. I like high intensity.
- Elon Musk
Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn’t an artist, he was a plumber.
- Seth Godin
Money won’t make you happy… but everybody wants to find out for themselves.
- Zig Ziglar
Here’s a statistician joke for your next hot date: Person A: What happens when Bill Gates walks into a bar of 55 people? Person B: I don’t know. What? Person A: The average net worth jumps to more than a billion dollars!
- Timothy Ferriss
Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore.
- Peter Thiel
It is hard to realize today that “government” during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln’s Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not “executives” and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.
- Peter Drucker
It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
- Winston Churchill
If you can see the invisible, God will do the impossible.
- Joel Olsteen
I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.
- Seth Godin
I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion.
- Steve Wozniak
m reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States – for the century, at least.
- Elon Musk
RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.
- Jack Welch
Kickstarter isn’t a profit center, it’s an organizer and an instigator.
- Seth Godin
For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
- Bill Gates
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
There is no man living who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.
- Henry Ford
I believe God gives you the grace to do what you need to do.
- Joel Olsteen
The interesting products out on the Internet today are not building new technologies. They’re combining technologies. Instagram, for instance: Photos plus geolocation plus filters. Foursquare: restaurant reviews plus check-ins plus geo.
- Jack Dorsey
We live well below our means. We wear inexpensive suits and drive American-made cars. Only a minority of us drive the current-model-year automobile. Only a minority ever lease our motor vehicles.
- Thomas J Stanley
Until you have learned to be tolerant with those who do not always agree with you, you will be neither successful nor happy.
- Napoleon Hill
I think that any wealth creates a sense of trusteeship… it is characteristic of the new generation which has created wealth to have some amount of responsibility for it.
- Azim Premji
The regulatory systems in place disincentive innovation. It’s intense to fight the red tape.
- Travis Kalanick
Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
Since belief determines behavior, doesn’t it make sense that we should be teaching ethical, moral values in every home and in every school in America?
- Zig Ziglar
Around the survivors a perimeter create.
- Yoda
We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.
- Larry Page
Strive to be the very best you can be. Run the race against yourself and not the guy in the other lane. The reason I say that is, as long as you give it 110% you are going to succeed. But as long as you’re trying to beat the guy over there, you are worried about him; you’re not worrying about how you’ve got to perform
- Herschel Walker
The courage take tough yes-or-no decisions. Look, the world is filled with gray. Anyone can look at an issue from every different angle. Some smart people can –and will-analyze those angles indefinitely. But effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information.
- Jack Welch
Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government, but not to the point of being a libertarian.
- Rupert Murdoch
Maintain a pragmatic approach, keep up with the multitude of trials and strive to remain its level of attainment in order for achieving sound performance and scaling new heights.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Well I think a lot of times we’re putting things off and I’m going to do it later. I’m going to break this bad habit or I’m going to pursue this dream or I’m going to treat my spouse better.
- Joel Olsteen
