Notable Quotables

As Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: “The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.

- Jack Welch

You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.

- Seth Godin

I never thought about success. I always thought about doing the job at hand. My goal was getting through the show that night.

- Steve Martin

Answer me this: would you work harder to earn $100 or avoid losing $100? The smiley optimist says the former, but if research from the Center for Experimental Social Science at New York University is any indication, fear of loss is the home-run winner. Experimental groups given $15 and then told the $15 would be rescinded if they lost a subsequent auction routinely overbid the most. Groups offered $15 if they won weren’t nearly as committed.

- Timothy Ferriss

Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don’t have investments in.

- Ben Horowitz

Whenever you go out-of-doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every handclasp. Do not fear being misunderstood and do not waste a minute thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering off direction, you will move straight to the goal. Keep your mind on the great and splendid things you would like to do, and then, as the days go gliding away, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the element it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual . . . Thought is supreme. Preserve a right mental attitude – the attitude of courage, frankness, and good cheer. To think rightly is to create. All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m in a different position than most CEO’s. I’m a founder. I’m not a hired CEO. Now, I can be fired by the board, but most CEO’s are hired by the board.

- Howard Schultz

The most “successful” companies seemed to embrace a sort of anti-business model where they lost money as they grew.

- Peter Thiel

Start calling yourself healed, happy, whole, blessed, and prosperous. Stop talking to God about how big your mountains are, and start talking to your mountains about how big your God is!

- Joel Olsteen

Opportunity is walking through your life every day in the form of people you meet.

- Zig Ziglar

I think if you look at people, whether in business or government, who haven’t had any moral compass, who’ve just changed to say whatever they thought the popular thing was, in the end they’re losers.

- Michael Bloomberg

Most GE business leaders now have digital cockpits on their computer screens that update in real time all the important data to help them manager their businesses.

- Jack Welch

I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States.

- Stephen Wynn

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

- Warren Buffett

Great foresight is required to run a multinational corporation. A magnificent blueprint, a loyal team and a well-coordinated organization are the three indispensable factors, and the same applies from ruling a country to maintaining a family.

- Cheng Yu-tung

We can say with certainty – or 90% probability – that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.

- Peter Drucker

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say “I.” And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say “I.” They don’t think “I.” They think “we”; they think “team.” They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but “we” gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

- Peter Drucker

You cannot expect to live a positive life if you hang with negative people.

- Joel Olsteen

Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets

- Steve Jobs

Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so love the people who treat you right, forget about the ones who don’t, and believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.

- Harvey Mackay

You must capture and keep the heart of the original and supremely able man before his brain can do its best.

- Andrew Carnegie

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.

- Warren Buffett

Control your temper. Remember, you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.

- Dale Carnegie

While there were a number of highlights, it was probably the U.S. that topped the highlight list with strong order growth of approximately 20 percent year over year. This is better order growth than we’ve experienced in the last six quarters in the U.S..

- John Chambers

If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.

- Peter Thiel

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes, but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Exchanging practically all the British infantry and artillery in India for Territorial batteries and battalions, and the formation of the 27th, 28th and 29th Divisions of regular troops. The New Zealand contingent must be escorted to Australia and there, with 25,000 Australians, await convoys to Europe. Meanwhile the leading troops of the Canadian Army, about 25,000 strong, had to be brought across the Atlantic. All this was of course additional to the main situation in the North Sea and to the continued flow of drafts, reinforcements and supplies across the Channel. Meanwhile the enemy’s Fleet remained intact, waiting, as we might think, its moment to strike; and his cruisers continued to prey upon the seas. To strengthen our cruiser forces we had already armed and commissioned twenty-four liners as auxiliary cruisers, and had armed defensively fifty-four merchantmen. Another forty suitable vessels were in preparation. In order to lighten the strain in the Indian Ocean and to liberate our light cruisers for their proper work of hunting down the enemy, I proposed the employment of our old battleships (Canopus class) as escorts to convoys.

- Winston Churchill

Nothing remains permanent in the world, change is just the eternal fact.

- Cheng Yu-tung

We saw that a thousand results weren’t necessarily as useful as 10 good ones.

- Sergey Brin

It took 23 years from Abraxane being conceived to us showing now with conclusiveness that it works in pancreatic cancer. We cannot afford as a society to wait another 23 years to make sure that the patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

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

- Lee Shau Kee

If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return – if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.

- Dale Carnegie

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

- Ben Horowitz

The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.

- Seth Godin

No one’s going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.

- Rupert Murdoch

The Italians live well. They have problems, like all countries, but they are well-dressed, the women are pretty.

- Francois Pinault

Momentum is a little fragile, and when people got excited before, they were disappointed, … But this is the most positive guidance we’ve given in eight quarters, going into a seasonally challenging quarter.

- John Chambers

I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.

- Walt Disney

It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

- Ben Horowitz

Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.

- John C. Maxwell

Here’s the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don’t you hate that? I love that there’s no map.

- Seth Godin

Embrace what you don’t know, especially in the beginning because what you don’t know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will be doing things absolutely differently from everybody else.

- Sara Blakely

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

- Seth Godin

We can schedule for it. Thursday, April 3rd, 3:05…start something. We can train for it, plan for it, announce it, and even hire for it. If initiating is as essential to the modern organization as it appears, we better be doing all of that and more.

- Seth Godin

You can’t fault government for seizing that opportunity. But it has an impact on Barbados’ current account deficit and it does bring with it attended risks. And, therefore, you have to ask whether or not the tourism business that is going to be generated from the publicity around the cricket matches will be sustained after the cricket matches are over.

- John Chambers

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.

- Jack Dorsey

One day a friend came by the job site and asked them separately what they were doing. The first said, Aw, we’re just laying brick. We’ve been doing this for thirty years. It’s so boring. One brick on top of the other.” Then the friend asked the second bricklayer. He just lit up. Why, we’re building a magnificent skyscraper,” he said. This structure is going to stand tall for generations to come. I’m just so excited that I could be a part of it.” Each bricklayer’s happiness or lack of it was based on their perspective. You can be laying a brick or you can be building a beautiful skyscraper. The choice is up to you. You can go to work each day and just punch in on the clock and dread being there and do as little as possible. Or you can show up with enthusiasm and give it your best, knowing that you’re making the world a better place.

- Joel Olsteen

To lead a meaningful life, one must build trust with others. To enjoy peace, a nation must win the confidence and support of its people. To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Dr. Carl Jung said: During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of hie, that is to say, over thirty-five, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

- Dale Carnegie

In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.

- Jorge Paulo Lemann

You reach a point where you don’t work for money.

- Walt Disney

People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.

- Zig Ziglar

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

- Robert Frost

Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today. I will be likened to the raindrop, which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking. I will persist until I succeed.

- Og Mandino

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

- Henry Ford

Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, ‘I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.’ That is why dogs make such a hit. They are so glad to see us that they almost jump out of their skins. So, naturally, we are glad to see them.

- Dale Carnegie

The constraint of 140 characters is easy to approach and consume, without a great deal of barriers to entry. One message and suddenly the whole world has access to that Tweet.

- Jack Dorsey

I believe it’s important that we use names of endearment that reflect a special feeling for the individual involved.

- Zig Ziglar

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

- Bill Gates

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

- Bill Gates

To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone.

- Sergey Brin

Don’t waste your time trying to win people over that can never be won over.

- Joel Olsteen

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

- Winston Churchill

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.

- Simon Sinek

Change means opportunity for those with the experience and confidence to look to the future.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Keep the right perspective Some people would love to have your problems. They would gladly trade places with you. They would love to have the job that frustrates you. They would love to sit in traffic in that car you don’t like. They would love to have your husband, who gets on your nerves. They would love to live in the house you think is too small.

- Joel Olsteen

The story about GE that hasn’t been told is the value of an informal place. I think it’s a big thought. I don’t think people have ever figured out that being informal is a big deal.

- Jack Welch

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

- Bill Gates

The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

- Peter Thiel

Say ‘Hello’ in tones that bespeak how pleased you are to have the person call.

- Dale Carnegie

Daimler uses Tesla’s battery packs, Mercedes-Benz uses a Tesla powertrain, Toyota uses a Tesla motor. General Motors has even created a task force to track Tesla’s next moves.

- Peter Thiel

We live in an age where everything is based on the short term.

- Howard Schultz

I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.

- Steve Ballmer

All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That’s why the word “salesman” can be a slur and the used car dealer is our archetype of shadiness. But we only react negatively to awkward, obvious salesmen—that is, the bad ones.

- Peter Thiel

We were guerilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit.

- Phil Knight

The object of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater.

- Seth Godin

Well, you know, I was a human being before I became a businessman.

- George Soros

I have an obligation to use what I know to try to bring real, usable medical science to every doctor and bedside and patient.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.

- Thomas Edison

Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.

- John Chambers

Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that’s associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.

- Bill Gates

The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit… a reputation, character.

- John D. Rockefeller

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