Notable Quotables

It’s [the internet] like the flu – it just spreads like crazy.

- Jack Welch

I’m not a politician. I only want to help relieve the suffering in communities, and I want to help people see their community in each other.

- Russell Simmons

About one in five of us is retired. About two-thirds of us who are working are self-employed. Interestingly, self-employed peoplemake up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires.

- Thomas J Stanley

Because there have been no settlements reached for the securities action with any of the less-involved banks, it is difficult to know what reserves are prudent.

- Ed Clark

Word of mouth works now, much more than ever. @-reply every single person.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The sad truth is, if you push hard enough, and if you’re so stubborn that you must have things your way, God will sometimes allow you to undertake a project without His blessing or at the wrong time. The problem with that, of course, is when you start something in your own strength and in your own timing, you’re going to have to finish it and maintain it in your own strength.

- Joel Olsteen

Every morning brings new potential, but if you dwell on the misfortunes of the day before, you tend to overlook tremendous opportunities.

- Harvey Mackay

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

- Thomas Edison

I think sometimes the critics want me to beat people down, and that’s not in me. I want to lift people up.

- Joel Olsteen

We are approaching a new age of synthesis. Knowledge cannot be merely a degree or a skill… it demands a broader vision, capabilities in critical thinking and logical deduction without which we cannot have constructive progress.

- Li Ka-shing

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

- Zig Ziglar

When you start a company, it’s a singular focus. You have the wind at your back.

- Howard Schultz

If I had to do it over again, I would have done the same but earlier. It is never too early to start something. The sooner you begin, the sooner you get your experience.

- Warren Buffett

True leadership cannot be awarded, appointed or assigned. It comes only from influence, and that can’t be mandated. It must be earned. The only thing that a title can buy is a little time.

- Napoleon Hill

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

- Thomas Carlyle

I may be over the top on this, but I just don’t want to like my competitors. I want my people to believe that whenever he and our other competitors succeed, we will be less able to do all the things we want to do.

- Phil Knight

When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew.

- Herb Kelleher

I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.

- Elon Musk

School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.

- Reed Hastings

One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

- Richard Branson

My favorite writers are all Jews – David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark – well, you get the picture.

- Zig Ziglar

Going the extra mile is the action of rendering more and better service than that for which you are presently paid. When you go the extra mile, the Law of Compensation comes into play.

- Napoleon Hill

Japanese tend to put sales and market share first. They make many products with the aim of raising sales. But then profits decline, and companies find themselves falling into debt… I changed the mindset at Canon by getting people to realize that profits come first.

- Fujio Mitarai

It almost goes without saying that the team needs diversity of skills. Can you imagine a hockey team of goalies? Or a football team of quarterbacks? It doesn’t make sense. In the same way, organizations require diverse talents to succeed, each player taking his part.

- John Maxwell

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. 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.

- Timothy Ferriss

A CEO’s job is to supervise all systems and to indentify weaknesses before the weaknesses turn into system failures. This can happen in many different ways, but it is exceptionally disconcerting when you company is growing rapidly. Your sales are increasing, your product of service is getting attention from the media, and suddenly you can’t deliver. Why? Uusually, it’s because your systems imploded from the increased demand. You didn’t have enough phone lines, or operators answering the phones. You didn’t have enough production capacity or enough hours in the week to meet the demand; or you didn’t have the money to build the product or hire additional help. Whatever the reason, you missed the opportunity to move your business to the next level of success due to failure of one of your systems…At each new level of growth, the CEO must start planning the systems needed to support the next level of growth, from phone lines to lines of credit for production needs. Systems drive both cash flow management and communication. As your systems get better, you or your employees will have to exert less and less effort. Without well-designed and successful operating systems, your business will be labor intensive. Once you have well-designed and successful operating systems, you will have a saleable business asset.

- Robert Kiyosaki

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

- Winston Churchill

There’s a wonderful saying that’s dead wrong. ‘Why did you climb the mountain?’ ‘I climbed the mountain because it was there.’ That’s utter nonsense…You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.

- Larry Ellison

The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished.

- Elon Musk

Entrepreneurs must think in specifics with laser-like precision.

- Jack Nadel

We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.

- Jeff Bezos

People around the world, they want the authentic Starbucks experience.

- Howard Schultz

China’s movie industry is growing a lot faster than that of the U.S.

- Wang Jianlin

Oracle’s latest database, version 12c, was specifically designed for the cloud. Oracle 12c makes all your Oracle applications multitenant applications without you having to make any changes whatsoever to your applications.

- Larry Ellison

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.

- Walt Disney

For any business to grow, individuals must be accountable for each of the systems, and a general overall director must be in charge of making sure all the systems operate at the highest capacity.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

- Warren Buffett

It’s not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobiles one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.

- George Washington Carver

At the very beginning I actually felt a bit nervous. I didn’t have much experience in gaming.

- Lui Che Woo

the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities. Take time to stop and smell the roses, or—in this case—to count the pea pods.

- Timothy Ferriss

Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.

- Confucius

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

- Napoleon Hill

There is no elevator to success…you have to take the stairs.

- Zig Ziglar

I always try to acknowledge what someone’s done well before talking about what could be done better. – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands

- David Novak

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

- Jack Welch

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

- Andrew Carnegie

I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don’t know what the future is going to hold.

- Ray Dalio

Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.

- George Soros

We are continuing to see a number of signs that could be interpreted with the appropriate caveats as optimistic.

- John Chambers

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.

- Winston Churchill

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

- Elon Musk

It’s not about how to get started, it’s about how to get noticed.

- Steve Case

The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business. Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this country’s future. We are becoming a high-cost and high-risk nation for investment.

- Gina Rinehart

People can get information – on entertainment, politics, finance – much easier than before. That will change the way people do business, the way people live.

- Robin Li

The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.

- Napoleon Hill

Boadicea then turned upon Verulamium (St Albans). Here was another trading centre, to which high civic rank had been accorded. A like total slaughter and obliteration was inflicted. “No less”, according to Tacitus, “than seventy thousand citizens and allies were slain” in these three cities. “For the barbarians would have no capturing, no selling, nor any kind of traffic usual in war; they would have nothing but killing, by sword, cross, gibbet, or fire.” These grim words show us an inexpiable war like that waged between Carthage and her revolted mercenaries two centuries before. Some high modern authorities think these numbers are exaggerated; but there is no reason why London should not have contained thirty or forty thousand inhabitants, and Colchester and St Albans between them about an equal number. If the butcheries in the countryside are added the estimate of Tacitus may well stand. This is probably the most horrible episode which our Island has known. We see the crude and corrupt beginnings of a higher civilisation blotted out by the ferocious uprising of the native tribes. Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.

- Winston Churchill

Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.

- Warren Buffett

You can either fit in or stand out. Not both.

- Seth Godin

Through some strange and powerful principle of mental chemistry which she has never divulged, nature wraps up in the impulse of strong desire, that something which recognizes no such word as impossible, and accepts no such reality as failure.

- Napoleon Hill

You have to get lost in the woods of your own doing and discover a way out. You have to find the right path over the creek, under the rock-whatever mechanism is good for your body’s size and your stride and your cadence and your tolerance for wet or cold or humid weather. That kind of learning comes from having a tolerance for failure, and extracting lessons from your failures.

- Marc Ecko

To make a ton of steel on and half tons of iron stone has to be mined, transported by rail a hundred miles to the Lakes, carried by boat hundreds of miles, transferred to cars, transported by rail 150 miles to Pittsburgh; one and a half tons of coal must be mined and manufactured into coke and carried 50 (odd) miles by rail; and one ton of limestone mined and carried 150 miles to Pittsburgh. How then could steel be manufactured and sold without loss at 3 pounds for 2 cents. This, I confess seemed to me incredible, and little less than miraculous, but it was so.

- Andrew Carnegie

Paper money will suffer. I’d be in mortar, not paper (money). We are in a time when paper investments are riskier than in the past. There is also a great amount of sovereign risk.

- Lee Shau Kee

All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current.

- Ben Horowitz

60% of the bonus was based on financials and 40% on Six Sigma (quality) results.

- Jack Welch

A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.

- Seth Godin

Life’s too short to fight the forces of change. Life’s too short to hate what you do all day. Life’s way too short to make mediocre stuff.

- Seth Godin

Every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit

- Napoleon Hill

Abe Lincoln once remarked that most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

- Dale Carnegie

No one has any idea what’s next… the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it’s delaying the recovery.

- Stephen Wynn

The Chinese who left the mother country had to struggle, and that became a culture of its own, passed on… through each generation. Because we have no social security, the overseas Chinese habit is not to spend a lot and to make a lot of friends.

- Lee Shau Kee

The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.

- James C. Collins

Be helpful. When you see a person without a smile, give him one of yours.

- Zig Ziglar

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

- Jeff Bezos

At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn’t even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm.

- Ma Huateng

It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

- Elon Musk

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”

- Ben Horowitz

You are going to survive. And good things are going to start to happen again. And one day you are going to look back and this will not even be such a bad thing.

- Dale Carnegie

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

- Andrew Carnegie

Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve.

- Dale Carnegie

For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate.

- Peter Thiel

Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.

- Bill Gates

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

- Bill Gates

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

- Napoleon Hill

We will be one of the most productive residential developers in China in the next few years.

- Lee Shau Kee

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

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