Notable Quotables

Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.

- Andrew Carnegie

I’m not the judge. You know, God didn’t tell me to go around judging everybody.

- Joel Olsteen

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.

- Peter Thiel

[On becoming in 1969 a full-time employee of his five year old company] There were nervous moments. Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Knight guarantee liabilities to the tune of $300,000,’ Penny’d say, ‘We don’t have $300,000.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t care. Just sign the thing.’

- Phil Knight

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

- Peter Drucker

If you don’t see yourself as a winner, then you cannot perform as a winner.

- Zig Ziglar

I tell college students, when you get to be my age you will be successful if the people who you hope to have love you, do love you.

- Warren Buffett

My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.

- Jack Ma

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

- Winston Churchill

Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

- Elon Musk

Stepping back from almost any situation with an underperformer, it’s always easy to see the solution. They need to move on—sooner rather than later. Up close, however, organizations tend to draw out departures, as people fret about the employee’s emotional reaction to being let go. Oftentimes, managers feel guilty about putting a friend out of work, or remorseful they didn’t give candid enough feedback along the way, or both.

- Jack Welch

Do you ever worry’ asked Dale Carnegie, I replied: ‘No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?’

- Henry Ford

When interviewing candidates, it’s helpful to watch for small distinctions that indicate whether they view the world through the “me” prism or the “team” prism.

- Ben Horowitz

The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going.

- Napoleon Hill

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

- Warren Buffett

Culture is one of the most precious things a company has…So you must work harder on it than anything else.

- Herb Kelleher

When someone we love is having difficulty and is giving us a bad time, it’s better to explore the cause than to criticize the action.

- Zig Ziglar

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.

- Bill Gates

In the 1970s, Japan moved into the U.S. turf with its televisions, cars, chips, and steel. But if you think about it, the only business Japan destroyed was the U.S. television industry.

- Fujio Mitarai

The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American.

- Winston Churchill

I think that diversity is key for the next American entrepreneurs. They want to be a part of this society where there is so much diversity they have to have people from all the experiences.

- Russell Simmons

Keep doing the right. God is building character in you, and you are passing that test. Remember, the greater the struggle, the greater the reward.

- Joel Olsteen

In every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear.

- Seth Godin

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

- Peter Drucker

As an entrepreneur, remove obstacles for your team. If there is anything that is holding the team back, get it out of the way.

- David Nilssen

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

- Howard Schultz

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.

- Thomas Edison

Differentiate yourself! Why are you different? What’s important about you? Why does the customer need you?

- Sara Blakely

You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.

- Timothy Ferriss

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

- Winston Churchill

Even today few businessmen understand that research, to be productive, has to be the “disorganizer,” the creator of a different future and the enemy of today. In most industrial laboratories, “defensive research” aimed at perpetuating today, predominates.

- Peter Drucker

A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.

- Yoda

God wants you to have a good life, a life filled with love, joy, peace, and fulfillment. That doesn’t mean it will always be easy, but it does mean that it will always be good.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Andy Andrews is the best speaker I have ever seen.

- Zig Ziglar

The torch relay is an excellent embodiment of all that the Olympic Games have come to symbolise – a celebration of the human spirit. Personally to me, it represents striving to be the best in whatever we do, never giving up despite the odds, and a commitment to health and fitness.

- Lakshmi Mittal

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.

- Bill Gates

Taxes are not good things, but if you want services, somebody’s got to pay for them so they’re a necessary evil.

- Michael Bloomberg

Apple has always leveraged technologies that the PC industry has driven to critical mass – the bus structures, the graphics cards, the peripherals, the connection networks, things like that – so they’re kind of in the PC ecosystem and kind of not.

- Bill Gates

Let your motto then always be ‘Excelsior’, for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.

- P.T. Barnum

Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.

- Ben Horowitz

The challenge with being an initiator of projects is that you are never, ever done.

- Seth Godin

You need to have extraordinary wisdom to be the forerunner.

- Ma Huateng

Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.

- Jack Welch

There’s plenty about God that I don’t understand and can’t explain. But I come back to my core belief that God is good, that He’s for us.

- Joel Olsteen

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

- Dale Carnegie

By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected.

- Dale Carnegie

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

Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an ever smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.

- Winston Churchill

If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent’s good will.

- Dale Carnegie

Manufacture, don’t just trade. There’s money in manufacturing even though it is capital intensive.

- Aliko Dangote

We’ll see how that evolves. Obviously, it doesn’t mean we’ll just be willing to do anything that’s requested of us.

- Sergey Brin

I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he’s got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.

- Bill Gates

I’m just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.

- Ray Dalio

Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines, the one who actually talk to the customer, are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble within it, you must listen to what your associates are telling you.

- Sam Walton

[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

Isn’t it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?

- Zig Ziglar

Churchill: The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labor Party): “If that had happened we should have lost the 1939 -45 war”.Churchill: No, it would have prevented that war.

- Winston Churchill

If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.

- Anthony Robbins

The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.

- Seth Godin

This could easily end up one of the driest winters ever, unless things switch around.

- Ed Clark

I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

- Jeff Bezos

The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting goals and achieving them. Even the most tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through each day convinced that every task, no matter how menial or boring, brings you closer to fulfilling your dreams.

- Og Mandino

People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Europe has always represented a major strategic opportunity to achieve our goal of creating and building an enduring global brand.

- Howard Schultz

Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.

- Henry Ford

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

I used to believe that a good product sold itself.

- Phil Knight

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

- Colin Powell

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.

- David Packard

Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.

- Bill Gates

If people look inward, they would see the opportunities for greatness.

- Aliko Dangote

Why do I drive a truck? What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?

- Sam Walton

My little girls are the most beautiful women in the world. I am a lucky, lucky man. I will spend every day making sure that they know this.

- Russell Simmons

I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.

- Winston Churchill

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.

- Walt Disney

I believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.

- Timothy Ferriss

Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

- Steve Jobs

I’d learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw – shapes of characters and things.

- Steve Wozniak

Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.

- Charles Ergen

If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they’ve done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress.

- Elon Musk

People who are using it to sell things on Craigslist to holding garage sales – campaigns – the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign both used Square to raise funds.

- Jack Dorsey

There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.

- Jack Welch

I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don’t know.

- Bill Gates

Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.

- Winston Churchill

More people will yell and wave at you to tell you that you forgot to close the gas cap than the amount of people who will stop to tell you that you are going the wrong direction with your life.

- Clay Clark

Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

- John D. Rockefeller

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