When people get at each other’s throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.
- Ray Dalio
Notable Quotables
My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.
- Oprah Winfrey
Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, what do I want to do everyday for the rest of my life…do that.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Optimists are those who go after Moby dick in a row boat with a bucket of tarter sauce.
- Zig Ziglar
If my mother hadn’t been the most patient person in the world, I might never have gone to school.
- Ben Horowitz
You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.
- Sam Rayburn
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
- Thomas Edison
Winners never quit and quitters never win.
- Vince Lombardi
Dividers seek to make themselves look or feel better by making others feel worse. They damage relationships, fracture teams and organizations, and create havoc in people’s lives.”
- John C. Maxwell
There is more treasure in books then in all pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.
- Walt Disney
Sooner or later, you will see a China-based company that really has a global impact, and I think Baidu has a chance to become one of those companies. We should be able to compete on a global basis.
- Robin Li
Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn’t claim to be a monopoly.
- Peter Thiel
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.
- Evan Esar
Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
- Winston Churchill
Money is fun to make, fun to spend and fun to give away.
- Sara Blakely
I already told you that it is 100% outside buyers.
- Lee Shau Kee
Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.
- John C. Maxwell
From my experience, there are so many regulations for investing in the United States that they become an impediment, a barrier to investing.
- Michael Otto
I’ve built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players…I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other. Because they’ve never had a chance to do that before. And they don’t want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates.
- Steve Jobs
The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls looking like hard work.
- Thomas Edison
In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Money won’t make you happy… but everybody wants to find out for themselves.
- Zig Ziglar
Chance can allow you to accomplish a goal every once in a while, but consistent achievement happens only if you love what you are doing.
- Bart Conner
I may be over the top on this, but I just don’t want to like my competitors. I want my people to believe that whenever he and our other competitors succeed, we will be less able to do all the things we want to do.
- Phil Knight
We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.
- Napoleon Hill
Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
- Zig Ziglar
Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.
- Reid Hoffman
Other people’s successes are good news – for them and for you. Good for you because they show you a way to go.
- Stephen Wynn
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
Life is a buzzer box. Poke it.
- Seth Godin
Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.
- Elon Musk
To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
- Elbert Hubbard
The object of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater.
- Seth Godin
I felt that it’s best just to be as transparent as possible.
- Rupert Murdoch
A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate.
- Donald Trump
How about we agree upon what our common American values are, which is let’s make this a true land of opportunity.
- Laurene Powell Jobs
1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).
- Timothy Ferriss
If you don’t agree with the core principles, which are the premise of that compromise, then you have to have what I call principled confrontation. And so that is the thing that we do that I think can rub some people the wrong way.
- Travis Kalanick
Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.
- Winston Churchill
Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.
- Winston Churchill
To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.
- Bill Gates
You will need to find ways to do less and less to make more and more.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.
- Yoda
In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.
- Bill Gates
Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.
- Timothy Ferriss
The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.
- Bill Gates
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
For now, if the Hong Kong environment doesn’t change, then in the long term, investing in Hong Kong is best.
- Lee Shau Kee
I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it’s hard to get them out on the air.
- Steve Martin
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
- Zig Ziglar
Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.
- Steve Jobs
The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo, the job is to invent the status quo.
- Seth Godin
Value is what you get.
- Warren Buffett
We didn’t really know what was happening.
- John Chambers
There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.
- Winston Churchill
Whatever you accept your employees will expect.
- Clifton Taulbert
What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.
- Winston Churchill
It’s only lonely at the top if you forget all the people you met along the way and fail to acknowledge their contributions to your success.
- Harvey Mackay
Fear is faith in reverse.
- Zig Ziglar
In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.
- Elon Musk
College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.
- Peter Thiel
Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.
- Elon Musk
In life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.
- Ben Horowitz
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
It’s all a risk. Always. That’s not true, actually. The only exception: it’s a certainty that there’s risk. The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That’s because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing.
- Seth Godin
I think how you start the day many times determines what kind of day you’re going to have.
- Joel Olsteen
All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.
- Peter Thiel
Mike suggested that we might want to turn our stockholders’ meetings into an event, and we went along with him.
- Sam Walton
Every company starts only once.
- Peter Thiel
Make it just like a Mac.
- Bill Gates
I try to live what I teach. A lot of things come against us in life, but we should try to find something to be grateful for, and see each day as a gift.
- Joel Olsteen
I very much believe that creating a sense of fun and keeping up everyone’s energy level is part of my job description. – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands
- David Novak
Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions, whether in the corporate or social sectors, to advance their own interests.
- James C. Collins
When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
- Thomas Edison
This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.
- Winston Churchill
If we can get you a car in five minutes, we can get you anything in five minutes.
- Travis Kalanick
Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you’ll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens to be electric and it’s twice the efficiency of a Prius.
- Elon Musk
The public is mad, frustrated, but what the public wants is progress.
- Michael Bloomberg
CNN is pretty consistently on the left, if you look at their choice of stories, what they play up. It’s not what they say. It’s what they highlight.
- Rupert Murdoch
The time will never be just right, you must act now.
- Napoleon Hill
Approach each customer with the idea of helping them solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.
- Brian Tracy
If you are only big in China, you are only a local Chinese company.
- Wang Jianlin
To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.
- Winston Churchill
A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing.
- Phil Knight
If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you. You will.
- Dale Carnegie
The regulatory systems in place disincentive innovation. It’s intense to fight the red tape.
- Travis Kalanick
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
- Randy Pausch
The Overseas Chinese habit is to save a lot and make a lot of friends.
- Lee Shau Kee
Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.
- Wang Jianlin
There is no shame in taking pride in achievements or position. But nobody gets to the top alone.
- Harvey Mackay
After the decline in the past few years, the worst moment in the economy of Hong Kong is now behind us. The local property market is expected to show a steady upward trend as from this point.
- Lee Shau Kee
The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.
- Mark Zuckerberg
It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.
- Warren Buffett
I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.
- Bill Gates
Failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. This way, it is about answering to yourself.
- Sara Blakely
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
- Peter Thiel
In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.
- Reed Hastings
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Some people do really find fault like there’s a reward for it.
- Zig Ziglar





