Notable Quotables

To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.

- Elon Musk

This notion that it is up to each person to innovate in some way flies in the face of the industrial age, but you know what, the industrial age is over.

- Seth Godin

I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.

- Larry Page

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.

- Walt Disney

My drive into high tech doesn’t involve a lot of people – just me and a very small team.

- Raymond Kwok

It enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that’s where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it’s where the apps are.

- Peter Thiel

Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw the stars.

- Dale Carnegie

One reason to buy a watch (or a book) is because you want to possess it, show it off, give it to your grandchildren. Holding a book is a luxury, one for which you pay a premium.

- Seth Godin

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ’cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

- Bill Gates

Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn’t really bother me.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We beat our expectations in the run up to Christmas and this time last year we had particularly high stock levels leading to a bigger clearance.

- Simon Wolfson

The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Let go of offence. Let go of fear. Let go of revenge. Don’t live angry, let go now!

- Joel Olsteen

Our history is based on extending the brand to categories within the guardrails of Starbucks.

- Howard Schultz

In the old days, Hong Kong was undeveloped, coming from a low base. Now it is on a high base, making it difficult to earn high multiples. We will certainly diversify out of Hong Kong and out of property. [On being asked where?] I don’t know. I haven’t found it yet.

- Lee Shau Kee

I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.

- Elon Musk

The characteristics that make a good advertisement or commercial – it’s memorable, engaging, entertaining, focused, sends a clear message, makes you want to see it again, makes you want to buy the product.

- David Novak

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

- Seth Godin

Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today. I will be likened to the raindrop, which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking. I will persist until I succeed.

- Og Mandino

The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them. Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams. So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them. Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m not averse to making a lot of money. But where does that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that the standard by which I should measure myself? Where does that take you if you’re in my business? I think it takes you to pretty dark, corrupt places.

- Timothy Ferriss

Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.

- Jack Ma

I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.

- Elon Musk

Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don’t start, you never get a chance.

- Seth Godin

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

- Napoleon Hill

It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested?

- James C. Collins

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

- Peter Thiel

The thing that’s confusing for investors is that founders don’t know how to be CEO. I didn’t know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don’t know how to be CEOs, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn. The question is… can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?

- Ben Horowitz

I totally understand that people are upset about it and I think that is a reasonable point of view to take.

- Sergey Brin

It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.

- Warren Buffett

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

- Jack Welch

As God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days.Why should you and I?

- Dr. Spencer Johnson

The Habit of Saving does not mean that you shall limit your earning capacity, it means just the opposite – that you shall apply this law so that it not only conserves that which you earn, in a systematic manner, but it also places you in the way of greater opportunity and gives you the vision, the self-confidence, the imagination, the enthusiasm, the initiative and leadership actually to increase your earning capacity.

- Napoleon Hill

I’m an HBO subscriber, and I watch a bunch of great shows on HBO.

- Reed Hastings

As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot.

- Ray Kroc

I had a feeling once about Mathematics – that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me – the Byss and Abyss. I saw – as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor’s Show – a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.

- Winston Churchill

For me, privacy and security are really important. We think about it in terms of both: You can’t have privacy without security.

- Larry Page

I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”

- Ben Horowitz

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

- Zig Ziglar

If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that’s not going to promote healthiness.

- Larry Page

Crash diets don’t work.They don’t work for losing weight, they don’t work for making sales quota and they don’t work for getting and keeping a job.The reason they don’t work has nothing to do with what’s on the list of things to be done (or consumed). No, the reason they don’t work is that they don’t change habits, and habits are where our lives and careers and bodies are made.

- Seth Godin

If you start today to do the right thing, you are already a success even if it doesn’t show yet.

- John C. Maxwell

King Alfred’s Book of Laws, or Dooms, as set out in the existing laws of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia, attempted to blend the Mosaic code with Christian principles and old Germanic customs. He inverted the Golden Rule. Instead of “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you”, he adopted the less ambitious principle, “What ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men”, with the comment, “By bearing this precept in mind a judge can do justice to all men; he needs no other law-books. Let him think of himself as the plaintiff, and consider what judgment would satisfy him.” The King, in his preamble, explained modestly that “I have not dared to presume to set down in writing many laws of my own, for I cannot tell what will meet with the approval of our successors.

- Winston Churchill

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

One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision. Life is a whole, and luck is a whole, and no part of them can be separated from the rest.

- Winston Churchill

You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated.

- James C. Collins

Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

- Winston Churchill

Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The alternative to tourism The linchpin, the engaged one, the graceful actor in an unfolding play—these people don’t seek to only inspect. They’re not traveling in order to tick a checkbox. Instead, they open themselves to the world they bought a ticket to, knowing full well that they will be changed.

- Seth Godin

One who buys things to write them off for their business whether they need them or not and who borrows massive sums of money to buy frozen yogurt and cupcake franchises that cannot possibly generate enough money to produce a livable wage, much less anything approaching prosperity.

- Clay Clark

Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.

- Sam Walton

A blow that would kill a civilized man soon heals on a savage. The higher we go in the scale of life, the greater is the capacity for suffering.

- Dale Carnegie

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

- Walt Disney

I think the acquisition of consumers might be on the verge of being mapped. The battlefield is going to be retention and lifetime value.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Appreciation – Learn to give flowers while people are still living.

- Joel Olsteen

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.

- Bill Gates

Study, along the lines which the theologies have mapped, will never lead us to discovery of the fundamental facts of our existence. That goal must be attained by means of exact science and can only be achieved by such means. The fact that man, for ages, has superstitiously believed in what he calls a God does not prove at all that his theory has been right. There have been many gods – all makeshifts, born of inability to fathom the deep fundamental truth. There must be something at the bottom of existence, and man, in ignorance, being unable to discover what it is through reason, because his reason has been so imperfect, undeveloped, has used, instead, imagination, and created figments, of one kind or another, which, according to the country he was born in, the suggestions of his environment, satisfied him for the time being. Not one of all the gods of all the various theologies has ever really been proved. We accept no ordinary scientific fact without the final proof; why should we, then, be satisfied in this most mighty of all matters, with a mere theory?Destruction of false theories will not decrease the sum of human happiness in future, any more than it has in the past… The days of miracles have passed. I do not believe, of course, that there was ever any day of actual miracles. I cannot understand that there were ever any miracles at all. My guide must be my reason, and at thought of miracles my reason is rebellious. Personally, I do not believe that Christ laid claim to doing miracles, or asserted that he had miraculous power…Our intelligence is the aggregate intelligence of the cells which make us up. There is no soul, distinct from mind, and what we speak of as the mind is just the aggregate intelligence of cells. It is fallacious to declare that we have souls apart from animal intelligence, apart from brains. It is the brain that keeps us going. There is nothing beyond that.Life goes on endlessly, but no more in human beings than in other animals, or, for that matter, than in vegetables. Life, collectively, must be immortal, human beings, individually, cannot be, as I see it, for they are not the individuals – they are mere aggregates of cells.There is no supernatural. We are continually learning new things. There are powers within us which have not yet been developed and they will develop. We shall learn things of ourselves, which will be full of wonders, but none of them will be beyond the natural.

- Thomas Edison

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.

- Joel Olsteen

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

- Elon Musk

Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market. That starts with asking yourself: what will the world look like 10 and 20 years from now, and how will my business fit in?

- Peter Thiel

The idea is to have relationships where you make money and the other guy makes money, too. That’s how a business keeps its team together.

- Russell Simmons

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

- Dale Carnegie

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. …

- Dale Carnegie

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.

- John D. Rockefeller

Twitter was around communication and visualizing what was happening in the world in real-time. Square was allowing everyone to accept the form of payment people have in their pocket today, which is a credit card.

- Jack Dorsey

I know a lot of people are upset by our decision but it is something we have deliberated for a number of years.

- Sergey Brin

Have you ever heard of Gmail? Ever used it? If so, it’s not because Gmail ran a lot of TV ads (they didn’t). It’s because the manifesto of free email got to you.

- Seth Godin

Changes that used to occur over quarters are literally occurring over months.

- John Chambers

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

- John C. Maxwell

EBay is a great company. There are a lot of good assets and good customers, and the U.S. people love it.

- Jack Ma

Those people blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.

- Mary Kay Ash

Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.

- Oprah Winfrey

I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone in my life. Now I tell people–don’t tell anyone your idea until you have invested enough of yourself in it that you are not going to turn back. When a person has an idea at that conception moment, it is the most vulnerable–one negative comment could knock you off course.

- Sara Blakely

Our schools are not teaching students to think. It is astonishing how many young people have difficulty in putting their brains definitely and systematically to work….

- Thomas Edison

The millionaires and billionaires who chose to invest in Australia are actually those who most help the poor and our young. This secret needs to be spread widely.

- Gina Rinehart

We must restore the emotional relationship that people have to the idea of America, that no matter where you come from, no matter where you live, that you have access to the same opportunities that somebody who is born in privilege.

- Howard Schultz

If we can get you a car in five minutes, we can get you anything in five minutes.

- Travis Kalanick

I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that’s true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.

- Mark Zuckerberg

The Cul-de-Sac ( French for “dead end” ) … is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes.

- Seth Godin

‘I don’t know’ has become ‘I don’t know yet’.

- Bill Gates

To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.

- Cheng Yu-tung

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.

- Thomas Edison

I believe if you keep your faith, you keep your trust, you keep the right attitude, if you’re grateful, you’ll see God open up new doors.

- Joel Olsteen

If you spend money on what you want, you’ll beg for what you need.

- T.D Jakes

I believe that the science of chemistry alone almost proves the existence of an intelligent creator.

- Thomas Edison

And I think the more money you put in people’s hands, the more they will spend. And if they don’t spend it, they invest it. And investing it is another way of creating jobs. It puts money into mutual funds or other kinds of banks that can go out and make loans, and we need to do that.

- Michael Bloomberg

Well I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

- Richard Branson

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