Notable Quotables

Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.

- Winston Churchill

You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated.

- James C. Collins

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

- Elon Musk

I’ve changed my will to show my concern for animal rights.

- Stephen Wynn

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

- Bill Gates

It marks a big step in a man’s development when he comes to realize that other men can be called in to help him do a better job than he can do alone.

- Andrew Carnegie

Dreams are extremely important. You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

- George Lucas

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

- Peter Drucker

Opening new stores outside of Japan is important, but training our employees is even more important.

- Tadashi Yanai

For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

- Bill Gates

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

- Elon Musk

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?

- Marshall Bruce Mathers III

I cut the feet out of my control top pantyhose one night, threw them on under my white pants and realized that the toning and shaping was perfect and that the hosiery material is thin enough that I could make shape wear out of it.

- Sara Blakely

I never hid my thoughts or feelings. During a business meeting I could get so emotionally charged and involved that I’d stammer out what others might consider to be outrageous things like, My six year old could do better than that! Or Don’t Walter Cronkite me!

- Solutions

I’m convinced that what kids need today are parents – not buddies. They need someone who will exercise mature judgment.

- Zig Ziglar

What kind of business world are we living in?

- Jack Ma

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

- Winston Churchill

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

People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.

- Peter Thiel

Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.

- Zig Ziglar

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

- Ben Horowitz

In my opinion, education is the finest gift an individual can give a young person.

- Donald Bren

I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

- Andrew Carnegie

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

I was afraid of the internet… because I couldn’t type.

- Jack Welch

There is a time to provide advice and offer an opinion, and there is a time not to. Don’t be too quick to offer unsolicited advice. It certainly will not endear you to people.

- Harvey Mackay

The expensive act of planning on late When you’re late, there’s not a lot of room for choice or decision or initiative. When you’re late, the path is well lit, and the choices are clear. Run! Run down the path you’ve run down before. Late is a tool for people unable to find the guts to stand for their acts. Late gives us cover; it permits us to trample forward, without creativity or panache. “Can’t you see I’m late!” we shout, as we do what we have to do, without even pausing to think about what we could do instead. Late might be useful, except that late is incredibly expensive. This strategy, the one we choose so we can avoid the fear of choice, costs us in so many ways. It degrades quality, misses airplanes, charges overtime, and shuts down those around us. It’s also exhausting. The alternative to planning on late is to initiate before it’s required, to ship before deadline, to put the idea out there before the crisis hits. This act of bravery actually gives you influence, leverage, and control in a way that planning on late never can.

- Seth Godin

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.

- Bill Gates

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

[On a small business class taught at university by Frank Shallenberger] Shallenberger started by defining the type of person who was an entrepreneur, and I realized he was talking to me.

- Phil Knight

So you need two professions: the one you have studied all this time, and your other profession the profession of persuasion that allows you to make good use of all those years of education, practice and dues-paying.

- Jerry Vass

The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively – I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook – it sounds trivial, but people matter.

- Reid Hoffman

Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards–and living up to them–is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.

- Seth Godin

There has never been a statue erected in honor of a critic.

- Zig Ziglar

For the year ended 31 December 2011, the Group sold 325 residential units in Hong Kong, generating attributable sales revenue of HK$8,308 million, a marked increase when compared with HK$4,842 million for the previous financial year.

- Lee Shau Kee

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.

- Winston Churchill

Being first is more important to me [than earning money]. I have so much money. Whatever money is, it’s just a method of keeping score now. I mean, I certainly don’t need more money

- Larry Ellison

I can’t read a computer screen and never use a calculator. It’s all in my head and by hand.

- Simon Reuben

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

- Aristotle

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

- Jeff Bezos

Uber is “way more” evil than Google, the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley.

- Peter Thiel

Look at all the billionaires. If I know 15 billionaires, I know 13 unhappy people.

- Russell Simmons

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

- Winston Churchill

On many long journeys have I gone. And waited, too, for others to return from journeys of their own. Some return; some are broken; some come back so different only their names remain.

- Yoda

We had been kicked out of one bank… The second, it was touch and go…

- Phil Knight

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war. – To Neville Chamberlain

- Winston Churchill

I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.

- Steve Wozniak

Sam phoned to tell me he was going to start a wholesale club. It was no surprise. He is notorious for looking at what everybody else does, taking the best of it, and then making it better.

- Sol Price

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be. As is your faith in the dark side of the Force.

- Yoda

People naturally follow those stronger than themselves.

- John Maxwell

But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.

- Peter Thiel

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

- Henry Ford

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

- Sam Walton

The debt limits have to come down. The whole world of debt has to be changed as far as this country is concerned. We have to create jobs and we have to create them rapidly because if we don’t things are just going to head in a direction that’s going to be almost impossible to recover from.

- Donald Trump

It never hurts a fool to appear before an audience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.

- Dale Carnegie

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

But I believe in fair trade, and I will tell you, I have many, many friends heading up corporations, and people that do just business in China, they say it’s virtually impossible. It’s very, very hard to come into China. And yet, we welcome them with open arms.

- Donald Trump

Artists don’t think outside the box, because outside the box there’s a vacumm. Outside the box there are no rules, there is no reality. You have nothing to interact with, nothing to work against. If you set out to do something way outside the box (designing a time machine, or using liquid nitrogen to freeze Niagara Falls), then you’ll never be able to do the real work of art. You can’t ship if you’re far outside the box. Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done. That’s where the audience is, that’s where the means of production are available, and that’s where you can make impact.

- Seth Godin

In the next decade, I see Spanx going worldwide. Everywhere. No butt left behind. It’s going to be all over the world and it’s going to be an aspirational brand that transcends categories. There’s so many things we can improve upon and make better.

- Sara Blakely

You are going to survive. And good things are going to start to happen again. And one day you are going to look back and this will not even be such a bad thing.

- Dale Carnegie

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

- Winston Churchill

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

- Bill Gates

A great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. Investors expect Twitter will be able to capture monopoly profits over the next decade, while newspapers’ monopoly days are over.

- Peter Thiel

I read the paper every day and the Bible every day, that way I know what both sides are up to.

- Zig Ziglar

At the age of 30, one can overcome difficulties. By the age of 40, one has thorough appreciation of and insights into the world and becomes firmly self-assured without being carried away by all those irregularities in life.

- Cheng Yu-tung

As he brooded over how to raise the money, he was informed by his father that he had always intended to give each of his children $1,000.00 at age twenty-one, and he now offered to advance John the money. But, John, he added lest his son expect miracles, the rate is ten. Having just retrieved a thousand dollars from Hewitt, Bill might have been looking for a high return on these idle funds. John knew his father too well to plead for a gift and accepted the 10 percent loan, which was higher than the prevailing rate. So on April 1, 1858 backed up by this borrowed money, John D. Rockefeller left Isaac Hewitt and joined the partnership of Clark and Rockefeller at 32 River Street (in Cleveland). At eighteen, he was catapulted to a partner’s rank in a commission house. It was a great thing to be my own employer, said Rockefeller. Mentally I swelled with pride – a partner in a firm with $4,000 capital! The moment was fraught with meaning for him and after his first day at work, he went back to the Cheshire Street house, fell to his knees, and implored the Lord to bless his new enterprise.

- Ron Chernow

The characteristics that make a good advertisement or commercial – it’s memorable, engaging, entertaining, focused, sends a clear message, makes you want to see it again, makes you want to buy the product.

- David Novak

The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.

- Michael Dell

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

- Dale Carnegie

My job is making money, helping other people make money. I am spending money, trying to make sure more people get rich, because you cannot spend a lot of money, right? So my job is spending money, helping others. This is a headache.

- Jack Ma

Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.

- Reid Hoffman

Nobody’s ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there’s some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.

- Richard Branson

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

- Jeff Bezos

[Medco] had a different culture with respect to spending money. I believe health care demands that we be as frugal as possible and pay money for things that matter. We’re pretty frugal. Everybody has the same size offices. Everybody has the same size cube. There are no perks.

- George Paz

I flunked my exam for university two times before I was accepted by what was considered my city’s worst university, Hangzhou Teachers University. I was studying to be a high school English teacher. In my university, I was elected student chairman and later became chairman of the city’s Students Federation.

- Jack Ma

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

- Steve Wozniak

Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that – it’s hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate ’em.

- Ben Horowitz

People are basically the same the world over. Everybody wants the same things – to be happy, to be healthy, to be at least reasonably prosperous, and to be secure. They want friends, peace of mind, good family relationships, and hope that tomorrow is going to be even better than today.

- Zig Ziglar

The marriage partner is not really the problem. No other person can ultimately make you happy. You must learn how to be happy within yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good

- Ron Chernow

It’s what we wrestle with every single day. The intersection of comfort, danger, and safety. The balancing act between vulnerability and shame. The opportunity (or the risk) to do art. The willingness to take responsibility for caring enough to make a difference and to have a point of view.

- Seth Godin

Not to have an adequate air force in the present state of the world is to compromise the foundations of national freedom and independence.

- Winston Churchill

One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.

- Jeff Bezos

I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. I do not read management or economics.

- Peter Drucker

Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it’s taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, ‘Let’s get out the camera and get that shot.’ You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.

- Bill Gates

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