Notable Quotables

It is always important that we have transparency, that we have shareholder protection. Then again, I think it is important that there are not so many regulations that management can’t make a decision without asking a lawyer whether he can do it.

- Michael Otto

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

- Henry Ford

There’s a finite market for DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming.

- Reed Hastings

How was your day? If your answer was “fine,” then I don’t think you were leading.

- Seth Godin

By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.

- Timothy Ferriss

Every pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, but every optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

Politics are close to me, but there are different ways of participating in politics.

- Vagit Alekperov

Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don’t change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.

- John C. Maxwell

Don’t fall in love with your wit. Your cleverly turned phrase may not, as you hope, show off how much gray matter you have, especially if the phrase is at someone else’s expense.

- Harvey Mackay

In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away.

- Peter Thiel

With an export-driven economy, Hong Kong is unavoidably affected by any hiccup in the outside world.

- Cheng Yu-tung

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure

- Abraham Lincoln

I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

- Bill Gates

You’re not being responsible with what God gave you if you’re hanging out with time wasters who have no goals and no dreams.

- Joel Olsteen

Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people. The management team.

- James C. Collins

I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.

- Rupert Murdoch

Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that’s fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.

- Bryan Adams

Don’t make excuses, don’t blame the past. The rest of your life can be the best of your life!

- Joel Olsteen

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.

- Dale Carnegie

The number of residential units which have been booked in the financial statements of the Group in the period under review totalled 5,800 and amounted to approximately HK$14 billion in aggregate value.

- Lee Shau Kee

Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker – whom I had hired to manage the store from TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen and I had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could alone. We pledges houses and property, everything we had.. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.

- Sam Walton

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

- Steve Wozniak

The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)

- James C. Collins

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be;

- Winston Churchill

Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas.

- Seth Godin

Goals enable you to do more for yourself and others, too.

- Zig Ziglar

In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.

- Peter Thiel

I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don’t know.

- Bill Gates

Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose…

- Thomas Edison

In the ’30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That’s not going to work today.

- Peter Thiel

The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.

- Napoleon Hill

Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11.

- Michael Bloomberg

Starbucks has a role and a meaningful relationship with people that is not only about the coffee.

- Howard Schultz

My organization, my colleagues and I, are paid to run hotels in good times and fair times. We’re professionals. That’s what we do. I don’t give a damn about the short-term market implications.

- Stephen Wynn

There should be order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.

- Ma Huateng

The Group has always adhered to prudent financial management principles.

- Lee Shau Kee

Wal-Mart became Wal-Mart by ordinary people joined together to accomplish extraordinary things.

- Sam Walton

I am a fifty-seven-year-old male, married with three children. About 70 percent of us earn 80 percent or more of our household’s income.

- Thomas J Stanley

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years of trying to get other people interested in you.

- Dale Carnegie

The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.

- Ray Kroc

The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions… If people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.

- Mark Zuckerberg

When you allow what someone says or does to upset you, you’re allowing that person to control you.

- Joel Olsteen

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it’s so easy to be motivated.

- Jeff Bezos

If you ask me whether the future is better than today, I would say yes; but the people must be ready to pay for services and pay their taxes.

- Aliko Dangote

The value we create is directly related to how much valuable information we can produce, how much trust we can earn, and how often we innovate.

- Seth Godin

I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

- Jack Welch

Proclaim this among the nations: Prepare war. Stir up the mighty men. Let all the warriors draw near. Let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, And your pruning hooks into spears. Let the weak say, I am strong.

- Joel 3:9

Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.

- Bill Gates

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.

- Peter Thiel

An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.

- Jack Welch

Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.

- George Soros

I just wanted to be in show business. I didn’t care if I was going to be an actor or a magician or what. Comedy was a point of the least resistance, really. And on the simplest level, I loved comedy.

- Steve Martin

Learn to speak God’s favor over every area of your life. Remember, the more favor-minded you are, the more of God’s favor you’re going to experience.

- Joel Olsteen

Tweeting is really only good for one thing – it’s just good for tweeting… It is rewarding, because it’s just its own reward. It’s sort of like heaven.

- Steve Martin

In the game of life, before you get anything out, you must put something in!

- Zig Ziglar

It is a well known fact that Henry Ford began his business career under the handicap of poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance. It is an equally well known fact that, within the inconceivably short period of ten years, Mr. Ford mastered these three handicaps, and that within twenty-five years he made himself one of the richest men in America. Connect with this fact, the additional knowledge that Mr. Ford’s most rapid strides became noticeable, from the time he became a personal friend of Thomas A. Edison, and you will begin to understand what the influence of one mind upon another can accomplish.

- Napoleon Hill

Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. It’s that simple.

- Phil Knight

There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

- Bill Gates

To Admiral Cunningham it was against all tradition to abandon the Army in such a crisis. He declared, “It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.

- Winston Churchill

Failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. This way, it is about answering to yourself.

- Sara Blakely

I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.

- Henry Ford

I wouldn’t ever say if you’re having tough times then there must be something wrong with you or your attitude. Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith. I encourage people to stay up, stay hopeful, stay faith-filled.

- Joel Olsteen

Pay attention to those employees who respectfully ask why. They are demonstrating an interest in their jobs and exhibiting a curiosity that could eventually translate into leadership ability.

- Harvey Mackay

It’s obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.

- Elon Musk

If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.

- Dale Carnegie

Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.

- Steve Ballmer

If you really believe that you’re making a difference and that you can leave a legacy of better schools and jobs and safer streets, why would you not spend the money? The objective is to improve the schools, bring down crime, build affordable housing, clean the streets – not to have a fair fight.

- Michael Bloomberg

The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.

- Oprah Winfrey

Before I left China, I was educated that China was the richest, happiest country in the world. So when I arrived Australia, I thought, ‘Oh my God, everything is different from what I was told.’ Since then, I started to think differently.

- Jack Ma

Marketing is the name we use to describe the promise a company makes, the story it tells, the authentic way it delivers on that promise.

- Seth Godin

My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars – this is very important – so you don’t have to carry the return fuel when you go there.

- Elon Musk

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

- Bill Gates

There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.

- Bill Gates

The public is upset. If they haven’t lost their job, they know somebody that has. If they haven’t lost their house, they know somebody that has. What do you do? When something’s wrong, it’s government’s job to fix it, it must be government that’s responsible for causing it.

- Michael Bloomberg

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

- Thomas Jefferson

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

- David Novak

People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.

- Timothy Ferriss

The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

- Peter Thiel

I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–1862)

- Timothy Ferriss

Future public education will require involvement and collaboration among various local, civic, private and nonprofit entities, a concept I like to refer to as ‘community entrepreneurship.’

- Donald Bren

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