A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.
- Oprah Winfrey
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
- Thomas Edison
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
- Niels Bohr
I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.
- Thomas Edison
Luck plays a role in business but whether you succeed or fail depends on many other factors. I haven’t really had a failure.
- Lui Che Woo
In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.
- Peter Thiel
If you’re a Wal-Mart of a Meijer you can draw the shoppers without using signs to advertise your specials, … But when you’re a little guy, you really depend on those signs.
- Michael Ward
Stealing Coach Wooden’s sets of three, I have come up with a formula for success no matter what kind of business you happen to be in: 1) Make sure you have the right people around you; 2) Have fun and drive results by recognizing the achievements of others; and 3) Be a passionate learner, and pass on what you know to others. Not only will this make you a success in business, but it will make you a success in life.
- David Novak
My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.
- Peter Drucker
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
About the only thing ordinary salespeople agree upon is the idea that you must sell yourself first.
- Jerry Vass
Just saying you are better than good won’t make it so. But, when you understand what it takes to live the better than good life, and you apply yourself, your life will truly be better than good.
- Zig Ziglar
So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work – what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?
- Ray Dalio
A lack of realism in the vision today costs credibility tomorrow.
- John C. Maxwell
Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.
- James C. Collins
The best way to conduct research on a larger scale is to make sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing… The sooner the better – start talking to other people about what you’re doing. Because that’s what will stimulate things the fastest.
- James Simons
It certainly wasn’t where we were planning to be.
- Simon Wolfson
The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.
- Seth Godin
The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.
- Peter Drucker
Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
- Peter Thiel
The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
- Zig Ziglar
The freedom of the new kind of work (which most of us do, most of the time) is that the tasks are vague and difficult to measure. We can waste an hour surfing the ’Net because no one knows if surfing the ’Net is going to help us make progress or connections. This freedom is great, because it means no one is looking over your shoulder; no one is using a stopwatch on you. This freedom is a pox, because it’s an opening for the resistance. Freedom like this makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.
- Seth Godin
I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business, I have always been pretty driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where we’ve been. On the one hand, in the community, I really am an establishment kind of guy; on the other hand, in the marketplace, I have always been a maverick who enjoys shaking things up and creating a little anarchy. And sometimes the establishments made me mad…
- Sam Walton
Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
- Steve Martin
Our international success started out first because we became the No. 1 casual wear brand in our home market of Japan. Then, we set up stores in the world’s major fashion centers of New York, Paris and London.
- Tadashi Yanai
To enjoy peace, a nation must win the confidence and support of its people.
- Cheng Yu-tung
After all God doesn’t want you to be an imitation of someone else. You should be the original you were created to be. There is an anointing on your life, an empowerment. Not to be somebody else, but to be you. If you let people squeeze you into their molds and you bow down to their pressure to try to please your critics, it not only takes away your uniqueness, but it also lessens the favor on your life.
- Joel Olsteen
Play the game for more than you can afford to lose . . . only then will you learn the game.
- Zig Ziglar
What you are will show in what you do.
- Thomas Edison
It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides.
- Winston Churchill
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
- Thomas Edison
If the United States wants access to Chinese, Indian or Vietnamese markets, we must get access to theirs. U.S. protectionism is very subtle but it is very much there.
- Azim Premji
So the challenge, as you contemplate your next opportunity to be boring or remarkable, is to answer these two questions: (1) “If I get criticized for this, will I suffer any measurable impact? Will I lose my job, get hit upside the head with a softball bat, or lose important friendships?” If the only side effect of the criticism is that you will feel bad about the criticism, then you have to compare that bad feeling with the benefits you’ll get from actually doing something worth doing. Being remarkable is exciting, fun, profitable, and great for your career. Feeling bad wears off. And then, once you’ve compared the bad feeling and the benefits, and you’ve sold yourself on taking the remarkable path, answer this one: (2) How can I create something that critics will criticize?
- Seth Godin
Tesla is becoming a real car company.
- Elon Musk
If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.
- Richard Branson
Great design = getting people to do what you want.
- Seth Godin
Creating ideas that spread and connecting the disconnected are the two pillars of our new society, and both of them require the posture of the artist.
- Seth Godin
It’s not where you start or even what happens to you along the way that’s important. What is important is that you persevere and never give up on yourself.
- Zig Ziglar
Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.
- Wang Jianlin
I don’t go down the road of condemning.
- Joel Olsteen
Urm. Put a shield on my saber I must.
- Yoda
Luke: What’s in there? Yoda: Only what you take with you.
- Yoda
I think my father is nearly perfect. I think he’s quite handsome, except a bit fat.
- Gina Rinehart
Nike is not about going to a ball game. It’s a business.
- Phil Knight
In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
- David Ogilvy
People stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
- Winston Churchill
Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. And once they arrive at Goldman, they find that even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It’s still optimistic—you wouldn’t play in the markets if you expected to lose—but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.
- Peter Thiel
Young men starting in life should avoid running into debt. There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt. It is a slavish position to get ill, yet we find many a young man, hardly out of his “teens,” running in debt. He meets a chum and says, “Look at this: I have got trusted for a new suit of clothes.” He seems to look upon the clothes as so much given to him; well, it frequently is so, but, if he succeeds in paying and then gets trusted again, he is adopting a habit which will keep him in poverty through life. Debt robs a man of his self-respect, and makes him almost despise himself.
- P.T. Barnum
Much to learn you still have…my old padawan… This is just the beginning!
- Yoda
Fulfilling the vision of the Irvine Ranch master plan has been a lifetime dedication and lifetime passion, and I am hopeful the heritage of our Irvine stewardship will live on in many new ways.
- Donald Bren
Fear is the Fatal killer of Desire.
- Zig Ziglar
A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.
- Zig Ziglar
We woke up one day, and all the sudden Starbucks was in the middle of this political crossfire between the people who want to bring a gun into Starbucks and the people who want to prevent it. It is a very difficult, fragile situation.
- Howard Schultz
My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.
- Winston Churchill
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
- Peter Drucker
The economy is like a machine.
- Ray Dalio
Starbucks is not an advertiser; people think we are a great marketing company, but in fact we spend very little money on marketing and more money on training our people than advertising.
- Howard Schultz
A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still.
- Dale Carnegie
I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.
- Winston Churchill
Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage.
- Howard Schultz
It never hurts a fool to appear before an audience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.
- Dale Carnegie
Given the uncertainty going into the Y2K quarter, we are very pleased with our quarterly results.
- John Chambers
You will never change what you tolerate.
- Joel Olsteen
Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.
- James C. Collins
Life’s most soothing things are a child’s goodnight and sweet music….
- Thomas Edison
Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
- Walt Disney
If you look at coffee, tea, food and juice, we think there are inherent opportunities. If you look at health bars or grab-and-go products that are in our stores, we think we can significantly enhance them and make them more widely available.
- Howard Schultz
The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.
- Dale Carnegie
Ultimately you want to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind
- Sergey Brin
Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.
- Jerry Seinfeld
What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.
- Bill Gates
I think George Will is somebody that said recently that the Republicans will not lose, as a Republican, that the Republicans will not win the election. I think it was a terrible statement.
- Donald Trump
Do I take criticism of Starbucks personally? Of course I do.
- Howard Schultz
I don’t think you should spend your life praying for things, but I do believe you should thank God for what He’s given you… but I think the scripture teaches us that we can pray for our dreams, pray for the big things… he’s not a small God; this God is incredible.
- Joel Olsteen
Being an Entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death
- Elon Musk
We’ve all been guilty at one point or another in our careers of boasting of perfect hindsight. It’s a terrible sin. If you don’t make sure your questions and concerns are acted upon, it doesn’t count.
- Jack Welch
All your ideas may be solid or even good .. But you have to Actually EXECUTE on them for them to matter.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
- Winston Churchill
Fatigue makes fools of us all. It robs you of your skills and your judgment, and it blinds you to creative solutions. It’s the best-conditioned athlete, not the most talented, who generally wins when the going gets tough.
- Harvey Mackay
If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
- Warren Buffett
So go ahead. Fall down. The world looks different from the ground.
- Oprah Winfrey
We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.
- Steve Ballmer
Tell them to grab on to the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy. And that, obviously, would be happiness.
- Jack Welch
Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.
- John C. Maxwell
Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?
- Ray Kroc
I think I will always have a connection to young people, to try to bring their voices to the polls, bring their voices wherever they can make a difference.
- Russell Simmons
Wild Turkey whiskey and Philip Morris cigarettes are essential to the maintenance of human life!
- Herb Kelleher
You cannot hang out with negative people and expect to live a positive life.
- Joel Olsteen
I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.
- Seth Godin
The Internet is the Viagra of big business.
- Jack Welch
We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. That is my new battle cry. Live and breathe Starbucks the way our customers do.
- Howard Schultz
Don’t do the natural thing, the impulsive thing. That is usually wrong.
- Dale Carnegie
Each time they Tweet, it sparks interaction.
- Jack Dorsey
In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
If you think your people are negative, then you had better check your attitude. Who you are is who you attract. This is the LAW of Magnetism.
- John Maxwell
Percentage margins don’t matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.
- Jeff Bezos
[B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell — a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great — was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing — namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. . . Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence — which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favour of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for would be not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that.
- Winston Churchill
We’ll continue to expand our footprint… Oracle’s Fusion cloud applications for HCM, CRM and ERP all have a new simplified user interface and an integrated social network that makes our enterprise applications as easy-to-use and familiar as Facebook, while enabling better collaboration and teamwork among your employees and your customers.
- Larry Ellison
