It’s absolutely a necessary and inevitable evolution in retailing (of Wal-Mart putting small stores out of business), as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car, and the dissappearance of the buggy whip makers. The small stores (and DJs) were destined to dissappear, at least in the numbers they once existed., because the whole thing is driven by customers, who are free to choose where to shop.
- Sam Walton
Notable Quotables
Inspiration can be found in a pile of junk. Sometimes, you can put it together with a good imagination and invent something.
- Thomas Edison
I always knew I wanted to run a business someday.
- Michael Dell
We certainly employ a lot of immigrants at Fox… and we do not take any consistent anti-immigrant line.
- Rupert Murdoch
I think it’s fair to say that our distribution system today is the envy certainly of everyone in our industry, and in alot of others as well…We’ve spend almost $700 million builing up the current computer and satellite systems we have….You can’t generate sales unless you have the product there when the customer wants it.The math is pretty simple: if we both sell the same goods for the same price at retail, we’ll earn 2.5 percent more profit than they will right there.
- Sam Walton
If your business is not a brand, it is just a commodity.
- Donald Trump
Capital isn’t scarce, vision is.
- Sam Walton
What do you want? is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer.
- Timothy Ferriss
I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,” said Schwab, the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors.
- Dale Carnegie
People want to watch whatever video they want to watch whenever they want to watch. If you provision your Internet infrastructure adequately, you can do that.
- Bill Gates
The Internet is the Viagra of big business.
- Jack Welch
Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.
- John C. Maxwell
Over the past 30 years, the nation has gradually opened up under such reform policies, which have presented enormous challenges and unlimited opportunities for the people and benefited the development of the nation all these years.
- Cheng Yu-tung
By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: ‘John, I’d love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I’ve got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said ‘no’ yesterday. Gotta run!
- Timothy Ferriss
The greatest business people I’ve met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.
- Michael Gerber
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
- Abraham Lincoln
The passion for art is, as for believers, very religious. It unites people, its message is of common humanity. Art has become my religion – others pray in church. It’s a banality, but you don’t possess art, it possesses you. It’s like falling in love.
- Francois Pinault
Always remember that nothing kills great ideas more than people with small ideas and limited imaginations.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I… had no need for cheering dreams,” he wrote. Facts are better than dreams.
- James C. Collins
A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
- Peter Thiel
Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.
- John C. Maxwell
Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
- Napoleon Hill
AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.
- Bill Gates
The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
- Peter Thiel
Today is the tommorrow you worried about yesterday.
- Dale Carnegie
‘You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‘Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.’
- Joel Olsteen
Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
- Henry Ford
The screwball. Humor can often be effective and with this style, it’s emphasized. Appeal to the journalist’s heightened sense of the unusual. Stunts, sideshows, ancillary themes are put to work here.
- Michael Levine
The Web provides a very easy way to immediately grasp what’s going on. It really offers the transparency, so you can see, especially with the search engine, how people are using Twitter at one glance. The phone doesn’t allow for that.
- Jack Dorsey
Determine your destiny or somebody else will.
- Jack Welch
So at that stage you might as well keep growing, to get the advantages of scale.
- Sergey Brin
10% of Americans hold 73% of the country’s wealth.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The failure to strangle Bolshevism at its birth and to bring Russia, then prostrate, by one means or another, into the general democratic system lies heavy upon us today.
- Winston Churchill
When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
- Peter Drucker
It is not the rich man’s son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race for life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the dark horse in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office.
- Andrew Carnegie
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’
- Henry Ford
Same problem as every Hollywood studio: how can you reliably produce a constant stream of popular entertainment for a fickle audience? (Nobody knows.)
- Peter Thiel
Although I don’t have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.
- Bill Gates
The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.
- James C. Collins
It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.
- Jeff Bezos
I don’t know where we should take this company, but I do know that if I start with the right people, ask them the right questions, and engage them in vigorous debate, we will find a way to make this company great.
- James C. Collins
For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.
- Joel Olsteen
Anyone working for a big company might be skeptical that a large business, or even a strictly online business, can form the same kind of friendly, loyal relationship with customers as a local retailer. I’m saying it’s already been done because I lived it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Living in the moment brings you a sense of reverence for all of life’s blessings.
- Oprah Winfrey
I love technology, and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.
- Steve Martin
No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.
- Brian Tracy
One of my goals is to inspire everyone I meet to become a better person.
- George Foreman
Yields will rise with prices, and this will generate steady income.
- Lee Shau Kee
It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.
- Winston Churchill
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.
- Winston Churchill
Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.
- Joel Olsteen
In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.
- Bill Gates
Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals. Management.
- Peter Drucker
Rockefeller never clarified why he dropped out of high school around May 1855, just 2 months shy of commencement, excercises on July 16…
- Ron Chernow
There is no shame in taking pride in achievements or position. But nobody gets to the top alone.
- Harvey Mackay
It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.
- Ronald Reagan
Life is not a dress rehearsal.
- Clay Clark
When I hear Mitt Romney say that he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, raised from the dead, that He’s his savior – that’s good enough for me.
- Joel Olsteen
If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.
- Elon Musk
Competitiveness is really what it costs you per man-hour to get you what you want. In other words, there’s an education level that plays into the mix and so if it’s inexpensive to buy an hour of real good education in places like China versus the U.S., that factors in.
- Ray Dalio
Without courage all other virtues lose their meaning.
- Winston Churchill
…Treasure what it means to do a day’s work. It’s our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it’s certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day’s work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you’ll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.
- Seth Godin
Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.
- Henry Ford
The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.
- Winston Churchill
In the game of life, before you get anything out, you must put something in!
- Zig Ziglar
Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.
- Zig Ziglar
Too often, sales reps simply regurgitate their presentations and expect to land the sale. It doesn’t work.
- Harvey Mackay
By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.
- Bill Gates
Management will endeavour to actively encourage staff to broaden their experiences and job knowledge for extensive application in the process of improving the Group’s operational and competitive performance. Combined with our strengths in both entrepreneurial spirit and managerial professionalism, this would result in the creation of a leading edge honed in a relentless drive for operational excellence in the Group’s future pursuits.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.
- Winston Churchill
Selling is the highest paid profession in the world. Our leaders in business, politics, research and the arts are all great sales people or they have great sales people on their payrolls.
- Jerry Vass
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
- Winston Churchill
Many a false step was made by standing still.
- Timothy Ferriss
I believe it’s less risky long-term to embrace change.
- Charles Ergen
I don’t spend any time thinking about my place in history, ever. If people say I changed things, it’s nice, and I take it – but if I could give it to a charity it would be useful. I really believe now that my only job in life is to achieve a state of comfort and happiness.
- Russell Simmons
In philosophy, politics, and business, too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.
- Peter Thiel
Experience has taught me,” says Sam Wood, that it is safest to drop, as quickly as possible, people who pretend to be what they aren’t.
- Dale Carnegie
“It’s clear there’s a lot of room for improvement, there’s no inherent ceiling we’re hitting up on.
- Sergey Brin
The buyer needs to talk at least 70% of the time.
- Clay Clark
Every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit
- Napoleon Hill
I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy.
- Michael Gerber
You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.
- John C. Maxwell
Uncontrolled Desire For Something For Nothing.
- Napoleon Hill
Ridiculous yachts and private planes and big limousines wont make people enjoy life more, and it sends out terrible messages to the people who work for them. It would be so much better if that money was spent in Africa and its about getting a balance.
- Richard Branson
My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.
- Larry Page
If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you.
- Dale Carnegie
People tend to over-weigh risks on a personal level. It’s one thing if you’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids to support, so that if you were to deviate from your job, well, how are you going to feed your family and pay the rent? That’s understandable, but let’s say you’re young and you’re just coming out of college, what are your risks? You’re not going to starve, certainly not in any kind of modern economy. It’s so easy to earn enough money just to live somewhere and eat food. Very easy to do. So I don’t know what they’re afraid of. Mostly afraid of failure, I think, but people should be less risk averse, when there’s not much at risk.
- Elon Musk
I think Bible principles are principles for life.
- Joel Olsteen
Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.
- Bill Gates
You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.
- Napoleon Hill
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
Wise men, when in doubt whether to speak or to keep quiet, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and remain silent.
- Napoleon Hill
Good action today will produce good living tomorrow.
- Zig Ziglar
If you spend money on what you want, you’ll beg for what you need.
- T.D Jakes
If you truly love what you are doing, why stop?
- Barry Schwartz
The good-will of a business which is losing money is not worth much.
- Ron Chernow
God puts people in our lives on purpose so we can help them succeed and help them become all He created them to be. Most people will not reach their full potential without somebody else believing in them.
- Joel Olsteen
If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.
- Dave Ramsey
One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.
- Henry Ford
Excepting for reading my numbers on Saturday morning and going to our regular meetings, I don’t have much of a routine for anything else. I always carry my little tape recorder on trips, to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.
- Sam Walton
