Notable Quotables

There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track… We and the consumer were one and the same.

- Phil Knight

If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost.

- Zig Ziglar

Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world. If you do so, you are insulting yourself.

- Bill Gates

But no parties could live under such labels as Petitioners and Abhorrers. Instead of naming themselves they named each other. The term “Whig” had described a sour, bigoted, canting, money-grubbing Scots Presbyterian. Irish Papist bandits ravaging estates and manor-houses had been called “Tories”.

- Winston Churchill

To build a successful business, you must start small and dream big.

- Aliko Dangote

There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.

- Winston Churchill

There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.

- Winston Churchill

Keep in mind, just because you don’t know the answer doesn’t mean that one does not exist. You simply haven’t discovered it yet.

- Joel Olsteen

It’s not going out to people who aren’t going to go shopping. You’ve already got the people who are shopping.

- Jack Taylor

I mostly eat healthy. I just do. I’m not a vegan for health reasons – although obviously I’m 20 pounds lighter than when I started. I stayed 20 pounds lighter. I feel better. My friends say I look better. All that’s true. But I’m a vegan for compassionate reasons

- Russell Simmons

Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind.

- Winston Churchill

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

- Jerry Seinfeld

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

- Jeff Bezos

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

- Thomas Edison

Sales were limited by how many shoes we had, shoes were limited by how many dollars we had to order them.

- Phil Knight

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

- Reed Hastings

most people go through college and learn to read Virgil and master the mysteries of calculus without ever discovering how their own minds function.

- Dale Carnegie

Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

- Jeff Bezos

I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.

- Joel Olsteen

As youngsters, my mother taught her children that while we might not be the smartest people around, we could be courteous, polite and considerate of others.

- Zig Ziglar

I have always believed that if we do well, we must also do something to help others in society.

- Henry Sy

the average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on earth put together.

- Dale Carnegie

Role play with yourself to answer questions to a cynic, optimist, and be able play devil’s advocate.

- Maurice Kanbar

Politics are close to me, but there are different ways of participating in politics.

- Vagit Alekperov

I believe in Judaism, I was raised a Jew, I’m happy to be one – or proud to be one.

- Michael Bloomberg

(1) Define a to-do list and (2) define a not-to-do list. In general terms, there are but two questions:

- Timothy Ferriss

We’re better than the rest of the country but we shouldn’t believe it too much.

- Peter Thiel

If there is to be a low-cost Uber, Uber will be the low-cost Uber.

- Travis Kalanick

Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.

- Seth Godin

There is tremendous stress these days on liking people, helping people, getting along with people, as qualifications for a manager. These alone are never enough. In every successful organization there is one boss who does not like people, who does not help them, and who does not get along with them. Cold, unpleasant, demanding, he often teaches and develops more men than anyone else. He commands more respect than the most likable man ever could. He demands exacting workmanship of himself as well as of his men. He sets high standards and expects that they will be lived up to. He considers only what is right and never who is right. And though often himself a man of brilliance, he never rates intellectual brilliance above integrity in others. The manager who lacks these qualities of character—no matter how likable, helpful, or amiable, no matter even how competent or brilliant—is a menace and should be adjudged “unfit to be a manager and a gentleman.

- Peter Drucker

Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.

- Peter Thiel

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure

- Abraham Lincoln

I define joy as a sustained sense of well-being and internal peace – a connection to what matters.

- Oprah Winfrey

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ is a good one because it not only turned out, I think, to be a really funny movie but it was also a delight to shoot. We were in the South of France, working with Glenne Headly and Michael Caine and Frank Oz the director – who were just fun.

- Steve Martin

Some people do really find fault like there’s a reward for it.

- Zig Ziglar

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

- Jeff Bezos

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

- Dale Carnegie

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

I’m a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That’s what I’ve done in my career, one that’s culminated in – at least to this point – playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That’s the Bakken field, which I believe will yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come, maybe more.

- Harold Hamm

The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima – so it’s more visible.

- Bill Gates

Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It’s more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.

- Bill Gates

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.

- Bill Gates

He wants to do something amazing in your life. Get in agreement and say, God, this is for me today. I’m raising my expectations. I’m shaking off doubt, negativity, disappointments, self-pity, little dreams, and little goals, and God, I will make room for a flood of Your goodness.

- Joel Olsteen

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.

- Bruce Lee

When you become a leader success is all about growing others.

- Jack Welch

Research indicates that employees have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company.

- Zig Ziglar

Learning to be a CEO through classroom training would be like learning to be an NFL quarterback through classroom training.

- Ben Horowitz

I have always respected education, which is why I actually went back secretly and taught school for eight years.

- Steve Wozniak

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, knowing him was like drinking it.

- Winston Churchill

No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it’s Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

As long as you’re living in regret, focused on the negative things of the past, you won’t move ahead to the bright future God has in store. You need to let go of what didn’t work out. Let go of your hurts and pains. Let go of your mistakes and failures. You can’t do anything about the past, but you can do something about right now.

- Joel Olsteen

The path of least resistence is the path of the loser.

- H.G. Wells

My natural inclination to be improv rather than an educated character serves me well.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

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

[In 1998] The Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse.

- Phil Knight

It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?

- Peter Thiel

I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

- Warren Buffett

You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth.

- Winston Churchill

We can consider 140 characters to be the full story, but it’s not. It’s just a caption. A headline for something broader.

- Jack Dorsey

I felt that it’s best just to be as transparent as possible.

- Rupert Murdoch

When you have one million dollars, you’re a lucky person. When you have 10 million dollars, you’ve got trouble, a lot of headaches. When you have more than one billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, that’s a responsibility you have – it’s the trust of people on you, because people believe you can spend money better than the others.

- Jack Ma

Now that we had a name, we had to have a trademark for the side of the shoe. It was 1971, and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million, so I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State, and there was a woman there saying, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money for the dress for this prom,’ And I said, ‘I have a job for you.’ I paid her $2 an hour, and she spent 17 and a half hours. So $35 and she came up with what is now the swoosh.

- Phil Knight

People are skeptical of many televangelists, and I’m sensitive to that.

- Joel Olsteen

(after listening to people gripe and complain just smile and remember) Crows can’t hang with eagles.

- Joel Olsteen

There’s nothing – I’ve bought everything I want. I don’t like yachts or anything; you know, I’m not a yacht person, and I’ve got pretty much the nicest plane I’d want to have.

- Elon Musk

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

- Mark Twain

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

- Bill Gates

At an early age, my mother gave me this feeling that anything is possible, and I believe that.

- Howard Schultz

Entrepreneurs must protect themselves and the venture at all times by documenting your agreements.

- Jack Nadel

When you give up yourself, that’s when you will feel the true spirit of Christmas. And that’s giving that’s serving others and that’s when you feel fulfilled.

- Joel Olsteen

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

There are seldom, if ever, any hopeless situations, but there are many people who lose hope in the face of some situations.

- Zig Ziglar

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who’s going to build.

- Larry Ellison

Will flash cards invade the disk drive makers’ core markets and supplant magnetic memory? If they do, what will happen to the disk drive makers? Will they stay atop their markets, catching this new technological wave? Or will they be driven out?

- Clayton M. Christensen

Learn from the past, but don’t live there. Build on what you know so that you don’t repeat mistakes. Resolve to learn something new every day. Because every 24 hours, you have the opportunity to have the best day of your company’s life.

- Harvey Mackay

We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.

- Bill Gates

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

- Jeff Bezos

It’s true that charisma can make a person stand out for a moment, but character sets a person apart for a lifetime.

- John C. Maxwell

She said, ‘My family is OK, John, but we lost everything.

- John Chambers

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved. What the executive needs are criteria which enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.

- Peter Drucker

I hate writing about personal stuff. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.

- Elon Musk

SLOW DANCE Have you ever watched kids On a merry-go-round? Or listened to the rain Slapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight? Or gazed at the sun into the fading night? You better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Do you run through each day On the fly? When you ask: How are you? Do you hear the reply? When the day is done, do you lie in your bed With the next hundred chores Running through your head? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Ever told your child, We’ll do it tomorrow? And in your haste, Not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch, Let a good friendship die Cause you never had time To call and say, Hi”? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. When you run so fast to get somewhere You miss half the fun of getting there. When you worry and hurry through your day, It is like an unopened gift thrown away. Life is not a race. Do take it slower. Hear the music Before the song is over.

- Timothy Ferriss

I grew up in a house where my father encouraged my brother and me to fail. I specifically remember coming home and saying, ‘Dad, Dad, I tried out for this or that and I was horrible,’ and he would high-five me and say, ‘Way to go.’

- Sara Blakely

I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, someway, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.

- Joel Olsteen

Our minds were freewheeling. We rushed to get things done.

- Sam Walton

Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.

- Yoda

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