our skills and talent, but above all, be tenacious. See yourself as victorious–which means never giving up
- Donald Trump
Notable Quotables
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
- Ray Kroc
A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.
- Abraham Lincoln
Getting things done in this country, if you want to build something, if you want to start a company, it’s getting to be virtually impossible with all of the bureaucracy and all of the approvals.
- Donald Trump
Medicine is the means by which we poor feeble creatures try to keep from dying or aching.
- P.T. Barnum
The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don’t have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
- Ben Horowitz
If a hurricane strikes, we can blame the president for not being there; we can blame Congress and FEMA; we can blame the state governments; but in the end, it’s the mayors and the local city governments that have to be prepared for emergencies and be prepared to act.
- Michael Bloomberg
You are looking at an economy that most CEOs are going to believe will be a good economy for 2006. Most CEOs are saying they are going to spend both on hiring of people and on technology.
- John Chambers
I’ve changed my will to show my concern for animal rights.
- Stephen Wynn
Eliminate the fear of old age by reaching a decision to accept it, not as a handicap, but as a great blessing which carries with it wisdom, self-control, and understanding not known to youth. Whip the fear of poverty by reaching a decision to get along with whatever wealth you can accumulate without worry. Master the fear of loss of love by reaching decision to get along without love, if that is necessary. Kill that habit of worry in all its forms, by reaching a general, blanket decision that that nothing which life has to offer is worth the price of worry. With this decision comes poise, peace of mind, and calmness of thought which will bring happiness.
- Napoleon Hill
The fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain.
- Zig Ziglar
A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
- Mark Zuckerberg
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
If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
- Dale Carnegie
If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
- Bill Gates
An educated man is not, necessarily, one who has an abundance of general or specialized knowledge. An educated man is one who has so developed the faculties of his mind that he may acquire anything he wants, or its equivalent, without violating the rights of others.
- Napoleon Hill
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
- Ben Horowitz
There is no business in America that would be prevented from taking results into account when making personnel decisions.
- Michael Bloomberg
I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along with it.
- Walt Disney
The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.
- Seth Godin
It’s about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it’s Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it’s going to be, ‘Storyteller.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Never surrender opportunity for security.
- Branch Rickey
Occasionally a man stumbles over the truth. Most dust themselves off and continue walking as though nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you’ve ever been able to create before.
- Seth Godin
All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory’ was the motto of the King’s Guard in ancient Greece.
- Dale Carnegie
Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don’t let these feelings stop them.
- T. Harv Eker
Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
- Peter Thiel
What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.
- Reid Hoffman
The epidemic So many people are frozen in the face of uncertainty and paralyzed at the thought of shipping work that matters that one might think that the fear is hardwired into us. It is. Scientists can identify precisely where your lizard brain lives. This is your prehistoric early brain, the same brain that’s in the lizard or the deer. Filled with fear, intent on reproduction. Steven Pressfield gives the voice of the lizard brain a name: he calls it the resistance. And the resistance is talking to you as you read this, urging you to compromise, to not be an troublemaker, to avoid rash moves. For many of us, the resistance is always chattering away, frequently sabotaging our best opportunities and ruining our best chance to do great work. Naming it helps you befriend it, and befriending it helps you ignore it.
- Seth Godin
Government isn’t that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you’ve got to have commercial companies do it.
- Elon Musk
Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.
- John C. Maxwell
Assume employees are going across a lot of networks. So you have to build in security from the home to any number of networks.
- John Chambers
Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The Minden prospect originated this past summer through a large acreage acquisition from a major oil company and Cabot now controls 3,500 acres over the area. We are pleased with our initial results and will remain active in this area throughout 2006. On forty-acre spacing, the prospect has the potential for 80 plus locations.
- Dan Dinges
Heroes always come from young people.
- Cheng Yu-tung
May the Force be with you.
- Yoda
The lifeblood of job creation in America is small business, but they can’t get access to credit.
- Howard Schultz
I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.
- Elon Musk
It’s true that charisma can make a person stand out for a moment, but character sets a person apart for a lifetime.
- John C. Maxwell
In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.
- Jorge Paulo Lemann
The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.
- Elon Musk
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
Eventually, all companies are replaced.
- Bill Gates
Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.
- James C. Collins
Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism – and wars.
- Dale Carnegie
We will intensify our efforts to build out our infrastructure overseas and to develop products that are tailored to individual markets
- Sergey Brin
Reckless he is. Matters are worse.
- Yoda
We’re totally legal, like totally legal, and the government is telling us to shut down. And you can either do what they say or you can fight for what you believe.
- Travis Kalanick
SLOW DANCE Have you ever watched kids On a merry-go-round? Or listened to the rain Slapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight? Or gazed at the sun into the fading night? You better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Do you run through each day On the fly? When you ask: How are you? Do you hear the reply? When the day is done, do you lie in your bed With the next hundred chores Running through your head? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Ever told your child, We’ll do it tomorrow? And in your haste, Not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch, Let a good friendship die Cause you never had time To call and say, Hi”? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. When you run so fast to get somewhere You miss half the fun of getting there. When you worry and hurry through your day, It is like an unopened gift thrown away. Life is not a race. Do take it slower. Hear the music Before the song is over.
- Timothy Ferriss
It takes a decade to grow trees but a century to nurture human beings.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Appreciation – Learn to give flowers while people are still living.
- Joel Olsteen
With the right pitch, you’ll get no argument. This is where the salesmanship comes in…It requires of you a substantial degree of self-confidence to pull it off, but your belief in your own project will help you muster that.
- Michael Levine
Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.
- John Wooden
In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn’t necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it.
- Seth Godin
I’m a strange mixture of my mother’s curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother’s father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.
- Rupert Murdoch
What I mean is that none of my talents had a – what’s that great word – rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer – there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I’m a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do.
- Steve Martin
I went online with winelibrary.com in July of 1997. That was my first professional online play
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.
- Reed Hastings
Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.
- Peter Thiel
With residential property prices having dropped by around two-thirds from their peak in 1997 and local interest rates dropping to their historic lows, mortgage payments currently falls below rental payment. This positive carry has led to property purchases by both home purchasers as well as investors. Further, with the local stock market becoming active again and reaching its highest level in the past 17 months, this has resulted in an increase in the number of transactions and a price for the luxury properties.
- Lee Shau Kee
Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.
- Bill Gates
Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.
- Peter Thiel
There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.
- Elon Musk
You don’t have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.
- Michael Dell
I kept saying, Sam, we’re making a good living. Why go out why expand so much more? The stores are getting farther and farther away. After the seventeenth store, though, I realized there wasn’t going to any stopping it.
- Helen Walton
There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye.
- Timothy Ferriss
For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the products. But now we understand the most important thing we do is market the product… Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.
- Phil Knight
When the Internet first came, I thought it was just the beacon of freedom. People could communicate with anyone, anywhere, and nobody could stop it.
- Steve Wozniak
Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.
- Elon Musk
Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
- Peter Thiel
President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy.
- Harold Hamm
Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.
- Sam Walton
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
With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.
- Seth Godin
Quit worrying about how everything is going to turn out. Live one day at a time; better yet, make the most of this moment. It’s good to have a big – picture outlook, to set goals, to establish budgets and make plans, but if you’re always living in the future, you’re never really enjoying the present in the way God wants you to.
- Joel Olsteen
What you keep before your eyes will affect you.
- Joel Olsteen
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
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
- Winston Churchill
When marketing put yourself in the shoes of the customer.
- David Novak
Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.
- Bill Gates
Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we will fall, but ‘when.’ There are no exceptions.
- John C. Maxwell
The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.
- Bill Gates
Money is not the motivating force. It’s nice to have money, but I don’t live high. What I enjoy is running the business.
- Rupert Murdoch
This country provides opportunities. If you don’t take advantage of them, it’s your own fault.
- Sam Huff
At the start of any business, keeping the cash flowing in is the entrepreneur’s most IMPORTANT JOB.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Be ‘hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise,’ and people will cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them over a lifetime – repeat them years after you have forgotten them.
- Dale Carnegie
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.
- Jeff Bezos
We have the best flat land, you can grow anything in the cheapest possible way; turning Nigeria around is not really that difficult. Nigeria is really the best place to invest, it is one of the places to make money; all over the world it (Nigeria) is the best kept secret actually in terms of investment.
- Aliko Dangote
Smith never wavered. Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark owned Scott Paper outright and beat Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories.12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.
- James C. Collins
A good practice is to have the employee send you the agenda in advance. This will give her a chance to cancel the meeting if nothing is pressing.
- Ben Horowitz
I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I believe the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master of that line.
- Andrew Carnegie
All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That’s why the word “salesman” can be a slur and the used car dealer is our archetype of shadiness. But we only react negatively to awkward, obvious salesmen—that is, the bad ones.
- Peter Thiel
There’s been so much corruption and so much cronyism in the taxi industry and so much regulatory capture, that if you ask for permission upfront for something that’s already legal, you’ll never get it.
- Travis Kalanick
We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun together.
- Walt Disney
My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.
- Sara Blakely
The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
- Timothy Ferriss
I don’t know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.
- Steve Ballmer
VaynerMedia filters the world how humans interact. This is how people are going to make buying decisions.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
