Notable Quotables

I’ve got the greatest job in the world. There’s no other job in government where cause and effect is so tightly coupled where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways and in so many different people’s lives. It’s a great challenge.

- Michael Bloomberg

I would call lack of candor the biggest dirty little secret in business, basically blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.

- Jack Welch

If my mother hadn’t been the most patient person in the world, I might never have gone to school.

- Ben Horowitz

I see tremendous imbalance in the world. A very uneven playing field, which has gotten tilted very badly. I consider it unstable. At the same time, I don’t exactly see what is going to reverse it.

- George Soros

An old battleax of a woman said to Winston Churchill, “If you were my husband I would put poison in your tea.” Churchill’s response, “Ma’am if you were my wife I would drink it.

- Winston Churchill

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

- Winston Churchill

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

- Seneca

[In January 2011] I think the important thing for Twitter is that it works on any technology.

- Jack Dorsey

A lot of advertising has gotten worse. I think it’s kind of lost its nerve, to be honest with you. I feel like the advertising of the ’60s, they were nervier. You know why? Because there was less at stake.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Stealing Coach Wooden’s sets of three, I have come up with a formula for success no matter what kind of business you happen to be in: 1) Make sure you have the right people around you; 2) Have fun and drive results by recognizing the achievements of others; and 3) Be a passionate learner, and pass on what you know to others. Not only will this make you a success in business, but it will make you a success in life.

- David Novak

If parents pass enthusiasm along to their children, they will leave them an estate of incalculable value….

- Thomas Edison

Newport Center has become a Mediterranean town. The climate here is the same as the Mediterranean’s, and so is the architecture. This center exudes a radiance, an energy. It will become a special way of life for everyone.

- Donald Bren

Kickstarter eliminates the risk that publishers and booksellers face. They have limited resources and limited shelf space, and Kickstarter is proof to them that something is going to work.

- Seth Godin

About 80% of our locations are second-generation. In other words, the building used to be, say, a Wal-Mart that moved out to become a Super Wal-Mart, or a Kmart that closed. It seems that such a site becomes available almost every year in every city.

- David Green

You can’t win by being more average than average.

- Seth Godin

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

- Jack Welch

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

When we are harassed and reach the limit of our own strength, many of us then turn in desperation to God-There are no atheists in foxholes. But why wait till we are desperate? Why not renew our strength every day? Why wait even until Sunday? For years I have had the habit of dropping into empty churches on weekday afternoons. When I feel that I am too rushed and hurried to spare a few minutes to think about spiritual things, I say to myself: Wait a minute, Dale Carnegie, wait a minute. Why all the feverish hurry and rush, little man? You need to pause and acquire a little perspective. At such times, I frequently drop into the first church that I find open. Although I am a Protestant, I frequently, on weekday afternoons, drop into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and remind myself that I’ll be dead in another thirty years, but that the great spiritual truths that all churches teach are eternal. I close my eyes and pray. I find that doing this calms my nerves, rests my body, clarifies my perspective, and helps me revalue my values. May I recommend this practice to you?

- Dale Carnegie

The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

- Michael Bloomberg

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

- Peter Drucker

Remember you’re not entitled to anything. You have to earn your success every day, and you will make mistakes like everyone else.

- Harvey Mackay

We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun together.

- Walt Disney

We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.

- Winston Churchill

I would love to do a deal with Walgreen. If they’re willing to come to the table, and offer rates in line with everybody else, then I’m happy to entertain those conversations.

- George Paz

I would argue heavily that the time that has been allocated to social used to come from television, and people are benefitting from it. People who are saying, ‘Aw, you’re spending all your time on Facebook, or all your time on Twitter,’ I’d like to understand what the person used to do with that time.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Poke the box How do computer programmers learn their art? Is there a step-by-step process that guarantees you’ll get good? All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer or it might be your boss. It’s a puzzle, one that can be solved in only one way—by poking.

- Seth Godin

Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.

- Bill Gates

The man who is bound in the slavery of debt is just as helpless as the slave who is bound by ignorance, or by actual chains.

- Napoleon Hill

The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.

- Peter Thiel

Stop doing things that waste time. Don’t replace time with your family or things that you need to do. I needed to put together two fantasy teams this weekend because that’s something I enjoy, but I did stop playing Nintendo Wii for hours on end.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

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

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

- Henry Ford

Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.

- Zig Ziglar

About HBO’s “Silicon Valley”: It’s a Good Show.

- Peter Thiel

If you are starting a business I believe it has to be your passion.

- David Robinson

Outlook 2003 did create the idea of search folders and the whole Longhorn philosophy. You can see it at work in search folders, where instead of having to drop things into individual folders, and things exist only in one folder, you create these search folders and you have the criteria for the search folder.

- Bill Gates

Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest. Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends.

- Dale Carnegie

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

- Bill Gates

Named must your fear be before banish it you can.

- Yoda

Cold steel and discipline and the slight capital surplus necessary to move and organise armies constituted the sole defences.

- Winston Churchill

Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience.

- Dale Carnegie

Obama has no solutions. Obama has failed the country and its great citizens, and they don’t like it when somebody such as myself speaks the truth about this – it hurts too much.

- Donald Trump

Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it’s easier, it scales and it’s profitable. But people don’t like it – we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.

- Seth Godin

God created every one of us to be successful. Before the foundation of the world, He laid out an exact plan for our lives. And in this plan He has moments of favor that will come across our path. These moments are not ordinary. They are destiny-altering moments.

- Joel Olsteen

Tweeting is really only good for one thing – it’s just good for tweeting… It is rewarding, because it’s just its own reward. It’s sort of like heaven.

- Steve Martin

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man…Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters – seldom in any school of writing.Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object….we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration:’The world is my country; to do good my religion.’Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in ‘The Rights of Man’, and that genius busy at his favorite task – liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, ‘The Rights of Man’ yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke’s effort in his ‘Reflections’.Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him.’Tom Paine is quite right,’ said Pitt, the Prime Minister, ‘but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.’Here we see the progressive quality of Paine’s genius at its best. ‘The Rights of Man’ amplified and reasserted what already had been said in ‘Common Sense’, with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France.So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre’s enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument.But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of ‘The Age of Reason’ and now turned his time to the latter part.Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events ‘The Age of Reason’ appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle – a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking.

- Thomas Edison

Stopped they must be; on this all depends. Only a fully-trained Jedi Knight, with the Force as his ally, will conquer Vader and his Emperor.

- Yoda

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

- Elon Musk

We found that for leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves.

- James C. Collins

You know, if you look back in the 1930s, the money went to infrastructure. The bridges, the municipal buildings, the roads, those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure. This stimulus bill has fundamentally gone, started out with a $500 rebate check, remember. That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China.

- Michael Bloomberg

A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.

- James C. Collins

Future public education will require involvement and collaboration among various local, civic, private and nonprofit entities, a concept I like to refer to as ‘community entrepreneurship.’

- Donald Bren

From the economic slowdown after the financial crisis in 1997 through the economic boom in 2007, the motherland has been supporting Hong Kong in recovering from adversity; on the other hand, Hong Kong has been actively cooperating with the motherland in going international.

- Cheng Yu-tung

If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

- Bill Gates

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

- Winston Churchill

Sometimes God gives instructions that go against conventional wisdom, such as treating people kindly when they’re hateful. Who really wants to do that? Instructions like that my not always make sense, so that’s why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.

- George Foreman

There’s always a wine bully. The one person who did read the ‘Wine Spectator,’ who tells you what to drink and why the ’97 is better than the ’98. I want to punch the wine bully in the face. I want to make sure this generation of wine drinkers isn’t elitist and snotty. I want it to be about family and bringing people together.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.

- P.T. Barnum

There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye.

- Timothy Ferriss

To create a big company, you need more partners, as it is hard to handle such a project alone. Such projects bring access to the expertise and management resources of the partners, and their connections above all.

- Vladimir Potanin

Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they’re still boring.

- Seth Godin

We have a number of difficulties facing our nation, but I believe fatherlessness is right at the top of the list.

- Tony Dungy

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

The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn’t have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want.

- Steve Wozniak

If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you. You will.

- Dale Carnegie

When we face with a steady eye the difficulties which lie before us, we may derive new confidence from remembering those we have already overcome.

- Winston Churchill

There’s always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It’s long since passed that a typical person doesn’t leave footprints.

- Bill Gates

Losing an A is a sin. Love ‘em, hug ‘em, kiss ‘em, don’t lose them! We conduct postmortems on every A we lose and hold management accountable for losses.

- Jack Welch

The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market?

- Peter Thiel

The love of a foster mother for her charge appears absolutely irrational.

- Winston Churchill

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

- Winston Churchill

The thing that I’m going to focus on today is essentially the cloud that has been over Nike’s head over the last couple years.

- Phil Knight

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends coming in.

- John D. Rockefeller

Planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out.

- Peter Thiel

There’s no single company in the whole world that has a big-scale production base and at the same time has screening and distribution channels. Wanda Group is the first one in the world.

- Wang Jianlin

I DECLARE it is not too late to accomplish everything God has placed in my heart. I have not missed my window of opportunity. God has moments of favor in my future. He is preparing me right now because He is about to release a special grace to help me accomplish that dream. This is my time. This is my moment. I receive it.

- Joel Olsteen

People say that globalisation has negative aspects, but I don’t believe globalisation is bad. It’s criticised from a western perspective, but if you put yourself in the shoes of people in the developing world, it provides an unprecedented opportunity.

- Tadashi Yanai

Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

- Og Mandino

Money will buy you a bed, but not a good night’s sleep, a house, but not a home, a companion, but not a friend.

- Zig Ziglar

Employees were invited to send complaints or suggestions directly to him and he always took an interest in their affairs. He was the best employer of his time, instituting hospitalization and retirement pensions. He was a fine boss if workers abided by the rules, but if they did something foolish, like show interest in a union, they promptly forfeited his sympathy. Rockefeller never acknowledged the legitamacy of organized labor, nor did he tolerate union organizers on his premises.

- Ron Chernow

I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.

- Seth Godin

I think the acquisition of consumers might be on the verge of being mapped. The battlefield is going to be retention and lifetime value.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.

- Rupert Murdoch

I try to make myself happy, no, because I know that if I’m not happy, my colleagues are not happy and my shareholders are not happy and my customers are not happy.

- Jack Ma

Experience has proven that the best educated people are often those who are known as self-made, or self-educated. It takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated is one who has learned to get whatever he wants in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists no so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and peristently applied. Men are paid nor merely for tha they know, but more particulary for what they do with that which they know.

- Napoleon Hill

It’s not about size, it’s about your ability to make a difference. At that small size, collaboration is all the more important.

- John Chambers

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?

- John Wooden

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