Notable Quotables

A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it’s harder to turn quickly.

- Tony Hsieh

Good communication is a give-and-take proposition. Don’t think of your pitch as a short speech, after which you get a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

- Michael Levine

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

- Steve Jobs

In war and policy one should always try to put oneself in the position of what Bismarck called “the Other Man”. The more fully and sympathetically a Minister can do this the better are his chances of being right. The more knowledge he possesses of the opposite point of view, the less puzzling it is to know what to do. But imagination without deep and full knowledge is a snare.

- Winston Churchill

I’d get kicked out of buildings all day long, people would rip up my business card in my face. It’s a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.

- Sara Blakely

This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.

- Peter Thiel

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

- Ed Clark

I will study and prepare myself, and someday the opportunity will come.

- Abraham Lincoln

Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Sooner or later, many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

- Seth Godin

A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.

- John Shedd

We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.

- Ray Kroc

Riches does not mean money. You can never have enough money. By following the principles of God he will provide you with what you need materially and internal committment.

- Ben Meinhardt

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

- Winston Churchill

It didn’t matter how bleak the situation or how stultifying their mediocrity, they all maintained unwavering faith that they would not just survive, but prevail as a great company. And yet, at the same time, they became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality.

- James C. Collins

The knowledge worker is not poverty-prone. He is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair.

- Peter Drucker

Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process. You can work only so many hours, fret only so much. Being a slightly better typist or a slightly faster coder is insufficient. You’re always looking over your shoulder, always trying to be a little less mediocre than the guy next to you. It wears you out.

- Seth Godin

I hate writing about personal stuff. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.

- Elon Musk

If failure is not an option, then neither is success.

- Seth Godin

Never allow anyone to get between you and your customers and suppliers.

- Jack Welch

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.

- Dale Carnegie

Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is my go-to song to pump myself up if I’m having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.

- Sara Blakely

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

If I’d had some set idea of a finish line, don’t you think I would have crossed it years ago?

- Bill Gates

Artists, actors, people like that, they live in a very strange bubble of their own. They’re mollycoddled; they’re highly privileged.

- Stephen Wynn

No one ever wants to see his or her name linked to anything bad. Conscience is like a baby. It has to go to sleep before you can.

- Harvey Mackay

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

- Bill Gates

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

- Bill Gates

The entrepreneur community, there’s a certain kind of founder, they call them a ‘lone wolf.’ I probably fit in that category.

- Travis Kalanick

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

- Warren Buffett

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical.

- Bill Gates

Game-playing is more fun when it’s virtual because you’re more successful. … in reality, only one person gets to be LeBron

- Larry Ellison

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

- Tadashi Yanai

You may not realize initially how many other opportunities are wrapped up inside the first one. After you go through the first door, you’ll then discover more doors automatically opening behind that one. One door leads you to another door, which leads to another door, and so one. It’s like ten other boxes packed inside one box. The initial door that God opens is your access to more opportunities. But you must be willing to walk through the first one to get to the other good things God has for you.

- George Foreman

[In February 2011] We’ve not done a lot of marketing whatsoever. A lot of it has just been word of mouth.

- Jack Dorsey

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

- Thomas Jefferson

Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.

- Mary Kay Ash

The response to the Starbucks brand has been phenomenal in our international markets.

- Howard Schultz

In order for the United States to do the right things for the long term, it appears to be helpful for us to have the prospect of humiliation. Sputnik helped us fund good science – really good science: the semiconductor came out of it.

- Bill Gates

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

- Peter Thiel

Many businesses forget that a crucial part of cash flow is managing your own bill paying. Make sure you pay your bills promptly. Ask for extended terms up front. After you have paid timely for two or three months, ask for additional extensions on your payable terms. A supplier will usually extend credit for 30 to 90 days to a good customer.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Get ready, get ready, get ready, to get ready.

- T.D Jakes

People who couldn’t fit into this informal and entreprenual environment left or were asked to leave. I cut my losses quickly on bad hires that didn’t perform.

- Jack Welch

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

Money is like an arm or leg – use it or lose it.

- Henry Ford

Complaints are your best learning opportunity

- Bill Gates

I’m not afraid to call a wine that tastes like Skittles or green peppers mixed with orange marmalade. I’ll say, ‘It tastes like chicken.’ I mean, that’s not what people think of when they think of wine, but that’s what it tastes like to me and it hits home.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.

- Peter Thiel

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

The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn’t always where you want to use it, and it isn’t always when you want to use it.

- Bill Gates

Most competitors quit long before they’ve created something that makes it to the top.

- Seth Godin

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

- Winston Churchill

Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

- Elon Musk

The slower growth in revenues and continued pressure on margins will result in negative earnings comparison for at least the next two quarters, with fiscal 1998 earnings per share likely to be in the 2 to 2.15 range.

- Phil Knight

I want to fight poverty and ignorance and give opportunity to those people who are locked out

- Russell Simmons

If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

- Peter Thiel

To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.

- Sam Walton

I grew up in a house where my father encouraged my brother and me to fail. I specifically remember coming home and saying, ‘Dad, Dad, I tried out for this or that and I was horrible,’ and he would high-five me and say, ‘Way to go.’

- Sara Blakely

I loved couriers. You had this transfer of physical information happening throughout the city and the world. Someone picking up the package, putting it in a bag, going somewhere, taking it out of the bag, giving it to someone else. I thought that was so cool. I wanted to map it, to see that flow on a big screen.

- Jack Dorsey

I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

- Timothy Ferriss

There are only two kinds of employees that I’ve run across in 30 years. There are ones that get results, and ones that make excuses. If you’re in that second camp, you’re not going to like Dish.

- Charles Ergen

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

And being as wicked as any man who ever lived, he exploited his advantage to the full.

- Winston Churchill

Self-centered leaders manipulate when they move people for personal benefit. Mature leaders motivate by moving people for mutual benefit.

- John C. Maxwell

Pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

- Sam Walton

Make the decision and say, I’m not letting that worry in. I’m done being upset when my plans don’t work out. I’m not letting that stress in.” Negative thoughts will still come to your mind, but you don’t have to let them into your spirit.

- Joel Olsteen

Continually get the word out about how you’re handling the situation.

- David Novak

Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.

- Larry Ellison

A word, a look, an accent, may affect the destiny not only of individuals, but of nations. He is a bold man who calls anything a trifle.

- Andrew Carnegie

We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.

- Winston Churchill

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

- Warren Buffett

No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.

- Ben Horowitz

The wealthy class often looks down on the poor as those people. And deprived people view the rich as cold and heartless. The way to break down the barrier between the rich and poor is to asociate with each other and to help one another. Make a connection. If you can break down the barrier, it may pave the way to recovery for some person, a family, maybe an entire community.

- George Foreman

We are in the process of creating a group that has a broader business mix, better quality income streams and a stronger balance sheet. In doing so, our risk profile is spread out and we can better explore the growth potential across our five core businesses – property, hotels, infrastructure, services and telecommunications.

- Cheng Yu-tung

It’s better to have a hundred people that love you, than a million people that sort of like you.

- Paul Graham

Everybody has equal opportunity, and I think that is true for everything.

- Mukesh Ambani

If somebody’s going on your board, and you’re going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.

- Ben Horowitz

The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

We cannot continue. Our pension costs and health care costs for our employees are going to bankrupt this city.

- Michael Bloomberg

m reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States – for the century, at least.

- Elon Musk

Structure a deal and create a plan around it.

- Jack Nadel

I do think – as self-serving as it sounds – that I was the right person, given the very, very strong headwind we had from the economy and our own issues, to come back and rewrite the future of the company.

- Howard Schultz

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations… They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them ‘operators’ or ‘programmers.’

- Peter Drucker

I do not believe that people want to work hard enough and they want to find the quick Twitter, SEO. Anybody who’s obsessed with SEO has lost already, period. I believe that firmly.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

There is always plenty of capital for those who can create practical plans for using it.

- Napoleon Hill

Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.

- Reid Hoffman

Most salespeople won’t stop talking long enough to let the Buyer make a decision.

- Jerry Vass

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