Notable Quotables

I don’t know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without vicory there is no survival.

- Winston Churchill

Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

- Ben Horowitz

If you hold on to what you want so tightly, it almost becomes an idol.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m pretty good at sticking to what I know. You don’t see me social commentating on health-care or presidential debates. I talk about what I know because I’m petrified of being wrong.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Number one, cash is king… number two, communicate… number three, buy or bury the competition.

- Jack Welch

Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today. So think thoughts of hope and confidence and love and success.

- Dale Carnegie

Rockefeller preferred to own raw land. In 1873, he invested in seventy-nine scenic acres at Forest Hill, a lovely, thickly wooded spot, crisscrossed by steep ravines and gulleys, just four miles east of his Euclid Avenue home.

- Ron Chernow

Don’t settle in the land of barely enough. That is where you are, it is not who you are. That’s your location, it’s not your identity. No matter what it looks like, have an abundant mentality.

- Joel Olsteen

The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.

- Peter Thiel

I believe in Judaism, I was raised a Jew, I’m happy to be one – or proud to be one.

- Michael Bloomberg

Don’t be impatient. It’s not over until God says it’s over.

- Joel Olsteen

If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

- Seth Godin

The construction arm of the Group always firmly adheres to the principle of ‘People is our priority’ and deploys a vast amount of resources to quality facilities and training of staff to ensure a safe and good working environment.

- Lee Shau Kee

You think Yoda stops teaching, just because his student does not want to hear? A teacher Yoda is. Yoda teaches like drunkards drink, like killers kill.

- Yoda

All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current.

- Ben Horowitz

God didn’t create you to be average. You were created to excel You have everything.

- Joel Olsteen

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.

- Peter Drucker

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known

- Walt Disney

Hope is the power that gives a person the confidence to step out and try.

- Zig Ziglar

I think very early on in life we all learn what we’re good at and what we’re not good at, and we stay where it’s safe.

- Sara Blakely

Find a job that you will be happy with and work hard at.

- Lee Shau Kee

The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.

- Michael Gerber

Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

- Peter Thiel

Few startup advisers and venture capitalists have any experience.

- Ben Horowitz

of preparing for defeat, prepare for victory. Prepare for increase. Prepare for God’s favor. You have to set the tone at the start of each day.

- Joel Olsteen

The Real ReasonNew College Grads Can’t Get Hired shocked many when it reported, The Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College finds that more than 60% of employers say applicants lack communication and interpersonal skills

- Martha C. White

I think Yahoo is a great company, with great assets.

- Jack Ma

On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.

- Seth Godin

Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.

- Dale Carnegie

Bill Gates was in his 20s when he started with $50,000 and became the richest man in the world with $90 billion. It’s a good idea that he did not ask too many people for their ideas on what they thought was possible for his life.

- Robert Kiyosaki

When overtaken with the temporay feelings of potential failure, burn all of your bridges of retreat, thus making retreat impossible.

- Napoleon Hill

When companies fail, or fail to grow, it’s almost always because they don’t invest in the people, the systems, and the processes they need.

- Howard Schultz

Everyone deserves at least a chance to make things better. And besides people can surprise you.

- David Novak

To be Jedi is to face the truth, and choose. Give off light, or darkness, Padawan. Be a candle, or the night.

- Yoda

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

- Winston Churchill

If you want to spend time saying this is cool, you’re going to get your ass kicked.

- Phil Knight

I feel that people I trusted – I don’t know who, on what level – have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it’s for them to pay. And I think, frankly, that I’m the best person to see it through.

- Rupert Murdoch

I always try to acknowledge what someone’s done well before talking about what could be done better. – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands

- David Novak

We live in a culture that relishes tearing others down. It’s ultimately more fulfilling, though, to help people reach their goals. Instead of feeling jealous, remember: If God did it for them, He can do it for you.

- Joel Olsteen

Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.

- Sergey Brin

I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.

- Bill Gates

It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter—nothing can justify that sacrifice.

- Timothy Ferriss

America, for me, is the country where, if you have something great to offer, you’ll be valued highly.

- Tadashi Yanai

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.

- Bill Gates

What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!

- Larry Page

To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.

- Timothy Ferriss

I DECLARE I will experience God’s faithfulness. I will not worry. I will not doubt. I will keep my trust in Him, knowing that He will not fail me. I will give birth to every promise God put in my heart and I will become everything God created me to be. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

God puts people in our lives on purpose so we can help them succeed and help them become all He created them to be. Most people will not reach their full potential without somebody else believing in them.

- Joel Olsteen

MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped: Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining? Was customer satisfaction rising or falling? What did our own engineers think of the products? By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers. It penalizes managers who sacrifice the future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if that investment cannot be easily measured. CLOSING THOUGHT It is easy to see that there are many ways for leaders to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you were trying to fix.

- Ben Horowitz

I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us- everything that exists – proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.

- Thomas Edison

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

- Winston Churchill

Europe has always represented a major strategic opportunity to achieve our goal of creating and building an enduring global brand.

- Howard Schultz

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

- Bill Gates

Money isn’t everything , but it’s right up there with oxygen.

- Zig Ziglar

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

- Elon Musk

The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.

- Bill Gates

I care about our employees more than anybody in my company. I care about my kids, too, but that doesn’t mean I give them everything that they want.

- Charles Ergen

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

Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it’s a powerful metaphor: in business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.

- Peter Thiel

My biggest wish is for government, the private sector and all of us to work together to make the Philippines the best tourism destination in Southeast Asia.

- Henry Sy

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

- Socrates

Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

- John D. Rockefeller

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

- Ben Horowitz

The Roman world, like an aged man, wished to dwell in peace and tranquillity and to enjoy in philosophic detachment the good gifts which life has to bestow upon the more fortunate classes. But new ideas disturbed the internal conservatism, and outside the carefully guarded frontiers vast masses of hungry, savage men surged and schemed. The essence of the Roman peace was toleration of all religions and the acceptance of a universal system of government. Every generation after the middle of the second century saw an increasing weakening of the system and a gathering movement towards a uniform religion. Christianity asked again all the questions which the Roman world deemed answered for ever, and some that it had never thought of.

- Winston Churchill

The choice is between two ways of life: between individual liberty and State domination, between concentration of ownership in the hands of the State and the extension of ownership over the widest number of individuals, between the dead hand of monopoly and the stimulus of competition, between a policy of increasing restraint and a policy of liberating energy and ingenuity, between a policy of levelling down and a policy of opportunity for all to rise upwards from a basic standard.

- Winston Churchill

A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn’t exactly been one of moderation.

- Donald Trump

Every patient is a consumer, and every consumer is a potential patient. What NantWorks is doing is building the world the way Da Vinci saw it, and augmenting every frame a human being sees as they work, live and play.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Too often, that solution is nothing more than adding another layer. What you should be doing is going to the source of the problem to fix it, and sometimes that requires shooting the culprit,

- Sam Walton

Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.

- Winston Churchill

Since we happened to be good at shoes, we thought we could be successful with casual shoes. But we got our brains beat out.

- Phil Knight

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren’t so exciting.

- Bill Gates

Restructuring a job usually means restructuring a score of jobs, moving people around, and upsetting everybody. There is one exception: the exceedingly rare, truly exceptional man for whose sake the rule should be broken.

- Peter Drucker

The dreams and passions stored within hearts are powerful keys which can unlock a wealth of potential.

- John C. Maxwell

If you’re in business, first and foremost, you have to be nice. Show your customers that you care.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I think that, ah, I’m a very goofy sort of person in many ways.

- Jeff Bezos

People who are using it to sell things on Craigslist to holding garage sales – campaigns – the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign both used Square to raise funds.

- Jack Dorsey

e liked to call them idiots for making it too expensive. Well, one megabyte of RAM back then cost 10,000 of today’s dollars. He made a cheap one — but what he did was he made a really weak, lousy computer, to tell you truth, in the Macintosh, and still at a fairly high price. He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there. It was a lousy product. Every time we improved the Macintosh, year by year by year, it got closer to what the Lisa had been.

- Steve Wozniak

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

- Bill Gates

We will invest 1.1 billion dollars in India, of which 150 million dollars would be for providing leasing and financial solutions to the company’s customers and partners.

- John Chambers

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: —There spread a cloud of dust along a plainAnd underneath the cloud, or in it, ragedA furious battle, and men yelled, and swordsShocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s bannerWavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.A craven hung along the battle’s edge,And thought, Had I a sword of keener steel —That blue blade that the king’s son bears, — but thisBlunt thing! — he snapt and flung it from his hand,And lowering crept away and left the field.Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shoutLifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down,And saved a great cause that heroic day.

- Edward Rowland Sill

People are skeptical of many televangelists, and I’m sensitive to that.

- Joel Olsteen

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

- Elon Musk

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. You want to be focused on it.

- Steve Martin

The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively – I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook – it sounds trivial, but people matter.

- Reid Hoffman

Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.

- Seth Godin

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