I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic … It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine’s works in my boyhood … it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker’s views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine’s writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, ‘What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!’ My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.
- Thomas Edison
Notable Quotables
For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate.
- Peter Thiel
On Facebook, the definition of great content is not the content that makes the most sales, but the content that people most want to share with others.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
He had realized something while arcing in slow circles toward the earth—risks weren’t that scary once you took them. His.
- Timothy Ferriss
Our history is based on extending the brand to categories within the guardrails of Starbucks.
- Howard Schultz
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
- Winston Churchill
The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitable of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.
- Timothy Ferriss
But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.
- Peter Thiel
Don’t fight change; embrace it, and you will step into the fullness of what God has in store.
- Joel Olsteen
In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.
- Winston Churchill
God will always bring the right people into your life, but you have to let the wrong people walk away.
- Joel Olsteen
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
- Stephen R. Covey
Opportunity is walking through your life every day in the form of people you meet.
- Zig Ziglar
In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example – and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.
- Rupert Murdoch
It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.
- Joel Olsteen
The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.
- Peter Thiel
Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.
- Warren Buffett
Make it easy to believe.
- Seth Godin
When we began Starbucks, what I wanted to try to do was to create a set of values, guiding principles, and culture.
- Howard Schultz
If your business is not a brand, it is just a commodity.
- Donald Trump
In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition.
- Peter Thiel
When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened
- Winston Churchill
I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.
- Elon Musk
I totally understand that people are upset about it and I think that is a reasonable point of view to take.
- Sergey Brin
If you need 15 minutes in the sun to trigger a melanin response, 15 minutes is your MED for tanning. More than 15 minutes is redundant and will just result in burning and a forced break from the beach. During this forced break from the beach, let’s assume one week, someone else who heeded his natural 15-minute MED will be able to fit in four more tanning sessions. He is four shades darker, whereas you have returned to your pale pre-beach self.
- Timothy Ferriss
Southwest consistently turns a profit because they have an employee ownership program that gives their employees a sense of ownership that is very real. When the company does well financially, the employees do well financially. When the company struggles, the employees struggle.
- Clay Clark
My first transistor radio was the heart of my gadget love today. It fit in my hand and brought me a world of music 24 / 7.
- Steve Wozniak
No one knows more about the way you think than you do.
- Seth Godin
The economy in Hong Kong remained on a declining path. Occurrence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (‘SARS’) in March this year led to a sharp drop in consumer spending and an increasing unemployment rate. The decline in the economy resulted in downward adjustment in the property market.
- Lee Shau Kee
Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
- Steve Jobs
Every person has a longing to be significant, to make a contribution, to be a part of something noble and purposeful.
- John C. Maxwell
The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios… The idea that you can actually predict what’s going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.
- George Soros
I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let’s examine the facts.
- Dale Carnegie
People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.
- Mark Zuckerberg
He spoke with more eloquence than wisdom.
- Winston Churchill
Not good — great.
- Jack Welch
Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.
- Jeff Bezos
The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.
- Vince Lombardi
I ask every participant to think about who their personal business mentors have been and why. I tell them my own business hero was Andy Pearson and I give them a few Andy stories to illustrate why. Then we break into groups of about twenty to go around in a circle and have each person talk about the person who has mean the most to him…We reconvene in the larger group and discuss some of the traits that were exhibited by the mentors; integrity, passion, inspiration, a positive outlook, and so on. A lot of people said it was someone who, helped me realize what I could achieve or really cared about me as a person. Then I try to get them to go a little deeper. I say, Now suppose that you were a fly on the wall, looking down on this room ten years from now. What would you like people to be saying about you? How would you feel if someone were saying that you were the person who had the greatest impact on his or her professional life?
- David Novak
Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.
- Larry Page
There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.
- Ben Horowitz
I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.
- Ben Horowitz
Managing a business, small or large, today requires an extremely disciplined, thoughtful approach with regard to the pressure that people are under.
- Howard Schultz
If you’re going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons.
- Seth Godin
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
E – Energize Others
- Jack Welch
Be more splendid, more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up.
- Oprah Winfrey
Extolling the virtues of conservation of energy, Churchill advised, “Never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lie down.
- Winston Churchill
Every setback means you’re one step closer to seeing the dream come to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
Imagination is more important that knowledge
- Albert Einstein
And if I were the president, I’d go out there and I’d emphasize the things I have done, and I’d say, ‘Some things haven’t worked, and I’m sorry about that, but I keep trying.’ And I’m – and I think the president is a very viable candidate, and you’re going to have a real horse race here no matter who the Republican nominee is.
- Michael Bloomberg
The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.
- Larry Ellison
I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.
- Charles Dickens
You need to be better not bitter.
- Nate Waters
We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.
- Winston Churchill
I love great music and art, but I think ‘cubist’ songs and paintings are hideous.
- Thomas Edison
Learn to do common things uncommonly well, we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.
- George Washington Carver
When you get a thing the way you want it, leave it alone.
- Winston Churchill
Say ‘Hello’ in tones that bespeak how pleased you are to have the person call.
- Dale Carnegie
The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Go from me to we. This is the job of every leader.
- Magic Johnson and David Novak
A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.
- Ben Horowitz
For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary.
- Peter Thiel
I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know ‘No, he couldn’t have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.’
- Steve Wozniak
Once the habit is ingrained and you become the starter, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to notice, to instigate, and to initiate. Momentum builds and you get better at generating it. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to initiate things all day the next day, you’ll wake up with a list. And as you create a culture of people who are always seeking to connect and improve and poke, the bar gets raised. What might be considered a board-level decision at one of your competitors’ companies gets done as a matter of course. What might be reserved for a manager’s intervention gets handled at the customer level, saving you time and money (and generating customer joy). This incredibly prosaic idea, the very simple act of initiating, is actually profoundly transformative. Forward motion is a defensible business asset.
- Seth Godin
The mainstream is always under attack.
- Bill Gates
There is never a bad time to start a business – unless you want to start a mediocre one.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
In many places where coffee is grown, deforestation is a major issue. With Starbucks’ position in the marketplace and the respect and relationships we have, we can – and have, in some cases – been able to educate and influence people.
- Howard Schultz
For me, it’s a purity thing about the joke itself. It’s a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that’s a legitimate item you have there. For me, it’s nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It’s just not what I’m in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.
- Jerry Seinfeld
If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are … a different game you should play.
- Yoda
The next season starts right now.
- Tom Izzo
We’re getting hurt, but I’m a long-term investor.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.
- Thomas Edison
Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.
- Bill Gates
You can’t get too much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good.
- Jerry West
Cherish your dreams as they are the children of your soul… –
- Napoleon Hill
The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people – including my ex-wives.
- Ronald Perelman
Frequently I’ll be interviewing with somebody or talking and in about 15 minutes they’ll interrupt me mid-stream and say, ‘Oh my God, you’re nothing like I’d thought you’d be.’
- Larry Ellison
Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.
- John C. Maxwell
The world is facing a new networked, digital lifestyle, and we will ensure that Canon remains ahead of the game.
- Fujio Mitarai
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas, but the image is that they all come from the top. I’m afraid that’s not quite right.
- Bill Gates
If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.
- Richard Branson
We modeled our employee stock ownership plan after Sam’s, and it worked well for us.
- Bernie Marcus
Hay que evitar siempre el ángulo agudo.
- Dale Carnegie
Boosted by ongoing increases in both its external trade and domestic consumption, mainland China is expected to maintain robust economic growth.
- Lee Shau Kee
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 went online with winelibrary.com in July of 1997. That was my first professional online play
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.
- Jack Welch
Always remember, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
- Winston Churchill
Money won’t make you have, but it will pay for the search.
- Prince
I’ve found that many of the greatest ideas surface in bars because that’s where many people cultivate inspiration.
- Herb Kelleher
I’m blessed to be a blessing to someone else.
- Joel Olsteen
I believe that continued strong consumer acceptance of our products at retail and the strengthening of our organization will enable us to manage through the challenges in our U. S. footwear business and lay the foundation for another round of growth.
- Phil Knight
Sound character provides the power with which a person may ride the emergencies of life instead of being overwhelmed by them. Failure is… the highway to success.
- Og Mandino
Beaujolais is so underrated.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize employees, family members and friends, and still not correct the situation that has been condemned.
- Dale Carnegie
You know, the diversity that America has is so special. It’s starting to really become a cool thing for young people.
- Russell Simmons
As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.
- Ben Horowitz
The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.
- Zig Ziglar
