The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
- Peter Drucker
Notable Quotables
Hong Kong’s history of success is built on its flexibility in the ever-changing global economy.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
- Ben Horowitz
The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must not look too good nor talk too wise.
- Dale Carnegie
You got to be rigorous in your appraisal system. The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.
- Jack Welch
A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
- Winston Churchill
Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.
- P.T. Barnum
I like the idea that one thing leads to another. You can tweet something completely innocuous, and then find yourself going off on a tangent that’s inspired by a response.
- Steve Martin
Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.
- Bill Gates
They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
- Aldous Huxley
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
- Bill Gates
I have a list of the hardest, most challenging problems that our company needs to solve and I start at the top and work my way down. And I have a list of the coolest most fascinating things that we can invent and I start at the top of the list and I work my way down.
- Travis Kalanick
My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.
- Winston Churchill
When you acknowledge God, He will go before you and make the crooked places straight.
- Joel Olsteen
Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they’re not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.
- Bill Gates
Puffery makes you look weak and not very bright. Representation makes you look strong and smart.
- Jerry Vass
Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.
- Steven Spielberg
The principle is competing against yourself. It’s about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before.
- Steve Young
I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
- Thomas Edison
The Overseas Chinese habit is to save a lot and make a lot of friends.
- Lee Shau Kee
I had learned that for any big idea you had to sell, sell, sell to move the needle at all.
- Jack Welch
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
My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.
- Richard Branson
I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
- Dale Carnegie
Everybody starts with creating or acquiring certain property in order to create the material to work with. When we started our business, we thought first of all about development, how to grow, and we managed to do this, even with all the difficulties and all the difficult rules that were implemented in Russia at that time.
- Vladimir Potanin
Named must your fear be before banish it you can.
- Yoda
The most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of the civilization without its mercy.
- Winston Churchill
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
- Winston Churchill
I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.
- Jeff Bezos
Strange as it sounds, great leaders gain authority by giving it away.
- Napoleon Hill
The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
- Peter Thiel
The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.
- Rupert Murdoch
I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about.
- Warren Buffett
Microsoft’s an important partner for Dell, an important company in the industry.
- Michael Dell
The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
- John C. Maxwell
Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy.”
- General H. Norman Schwarzkopf
For those that have fixed exchange-rate regimes, you will need a greater amount of foreign reserves. That’s the case in Belize, it’s the case in the Eastern Caribbean zone and it’s also the case in Barbados. In those cases, the level of reserve coverage is one of credit weakness. Where you have a bit more flexibility in the exchange rate ? for instance, Jamaica ? you would require a smaller amount of international reserves.
- John Chambers
That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity.
- Beryl Markham
The three short years I spent at Harvard, where I lived with excellent people, taught me not only that I must know how to choose my partners but also that choosing excellent partners is a skill you can learn. Obviously, when you spend time with the best, you learn how to choose among them.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
The first three-and-a-half months of calendar year 2001 have been extremely challenging for many of us in high-tech.
- John Chambers
By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.
- Bill Gates
The difference between blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It’s scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.
- Russell Simmons
You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.
- Seth Godin
The opportunity of a lifetime is to pick yourself. Quit waiting to get picked; quit waiting for someone to give you permission; quit waiting for someone to say you are officially qualified and pick yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, but it does mean you stand up and say, ‘I have something to say. I know how to do something. I’m doing it. If you want me to do it with you, raise your hand.
- Seth Godin
Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only to set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done.
- P.T. Barnum
Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.
- Peter Drucker
Ask yourself a question: Is my attitude worth catching?
- Zig Ziglar
I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I actually wanted to be Bruce Lee.
- Jack Dorsey
Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people”, that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
- Peter Drucker
People in tough times – it doesn’t mean they don’t have a great attitude.
- Joel Olsteen
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- John C. Maxwell
One day, I’d like to write a book about the worst ads ever run, but my fear is that it would be too long.
- Seth Godin
The idea is to have relationships where you make money and the other guy makes money, too. That’s how a business keeps its team together.
- Russell Simmons
Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.
- Ray Kroc
About half of our wives do not work outside the home. The number-one occupation for those wives who do work is teacher.
- Thomas J Stanley
The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.
- Bill Gates
Well, excuuuuuse me!
- Steve Martin
I first thought maybe I’d do a banjo presentation record, where I’d play a couple of songs and get a bunch of other players to do the rest. Then I realized I had enough of my own songs to do an album of them.
- Steve Martin
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.
- Yoda
Discipline is hard–harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.
- Atul Gawande
America gets its opinions from advertising.
- Phil Knight
This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.
- Winston Churchill
The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
- Ralph Nader
Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that’s really powerful.
- Reid Hoffman
You need to spend all of your time and energy on creating something that actually brings value to the people you’re asking for money!
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.
- Andrew Carnegie
If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.
- Timothy Ferriss
If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments.
- Zig Ziglar
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
- Winston Churchill
Americans believe cotton is best, but we’ve invented new fabrics that will change your lifestyle.
- Tadashi Yanai
Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.
- Joel Olsteen
A definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.
- Peter Thiel
Amateurs wait for inspiration. The real pros get up and go to work.
- Harvey Mackay
I find it fascinating that a lot of business books that do well are from people who’ve never made any money in business.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.
- Jack Welch
But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.
- Peter Thiel
The typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician.
- Michael Gerber
Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day.
- Peter Thiel
I’m not a businessman — I’m a business, man.
- Jay-Z
Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.
- Wang Jianlin
Every great business is built on friendship.
- JC Penney
There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
- Peter Thiel
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
- Thomas Edison
Simple works, complex fails.
- Timothy Ferriss
Life’s too short” is repeated often enough to be a cliche, but this time it’s true. You don’t have enough time to be both unhappy and mediocre. It’s not just pointless, it’s painful. Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
- Seth Godin
My big focus is China and OPEC and all of these countries that are just absolutely destroying the United States.
- Donald Trump
Advertising is to a genuine article what manure is to land, – it largely increases the product.
- P.T. Barnum
What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.
- Dave Thomas
You’d believe that a patient with hypertension, if you know you have hypertension or diabetes, you would take your drug every day. The compliance rate is more like 30% or 40%. Which means that 60% of patients don’t take their drugs, and they actually go into these crises, end up in the hospital.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The doctors actually told my family there was a five percent chance of me living.
- Ed Clark
The more people I serve, the richer I become.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The thing you fear most has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. Facing the truth really will set you free.
- Oprah Winfrey
We don’t want disruption where we just move things around from point a to point b. We want a direction, we want a purpose.
- Jack Dorsey
Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those who surrendered tamely were finished.
- Winston Churchill
Do all you can to make your dreams come true.
- Joel Olsteen
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.
- Peter Thiel
I did not like the way I looked in a pair of white pants.
- Sara Blakely
