Notable Quotables

To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, ‘I’d like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?’

- Larry Ellison

This is the city of dreamers and time and again it’s the place where the greatest dream of all, the American dream, has been tested and has triumphed.

- Michael Bloomberg

We’ve grown from 18% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry to 23% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry over the last five years. Profits are up over 70%, where the industry profit is up about 35%. Pretty good.

- Steve Ballmer

KNOWLEDGE will not attract money, unless it is organized, and intelligently directed, through practical PLANS OF ACTION, to the DEFINITE END of ac- cumulation of money. Lack of understanding of this fact has been the source of confusion to millions of people who falsely believe that knowledge is power. It is nothing of the sort! Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end.

- Napoleon Hill

Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.

- Peter Drucker

If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.

- Oprah Winfrey

To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.

- Clayton M. Christensen

Drucker said: ‘If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?’ … Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.

- Jack Welch

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.

- Ben Horowitz

Google actually relies on our users to help with our marketing. We have a very high percentage of our users who often tell others about our search engine.

- Sergey Brin

Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that’s something I’m accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn’t bother me.

- Timothy Ferriss

Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

- Peter Thiel

President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values.

- George Soros

It’s important that the company be a family, that people feel that they’re part of the company, and that the company is like a family to them. When you treat people that way, you get better productivity.

- Larry Page

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

- Winston Churchill

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

- Peter Thiel

The main rule to me is to honor God with your life. To life a life of integrity. Not be selfish. You know, help others. But that’s really the essence of the Christian faith.

- Joel Olsteen

Service for the Right Reasons: To Save the Whales, or Kill Them and Feed the Children? Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.

- Oscar Wilde

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

- Jeff Bezos

When you supervise something, it is one thing. When you are in the middle of something, there is a different pace of life.

- Vladimir Potanin

As a group, we believe that education is extremely important for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. We spend heavily for the educations of our offspring.

- Thomas J Stanley

A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.

- John C. Maxwell

I think my whole life, because of where I came from, I had a fear of failure.

- Howard Schultz

Be a coach, instead of being a boss. Rather than tell people what to do, a leader helps team members figure it out for themselves. That way, when it’s time for them to take the training wheels off, they’ll have some experience to draw on. That’s the way it was with me and Andy. We were working together, I felt like I was making all the decisions even though he had the title

- David Novak

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

- Andrew Carnegie

I’ve always been interested in science – one of my favourite books is James Watson’s ‘Molecular Biology of the Gene.

- Bill Gates

Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good

- Ron Chernow

There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. It’s not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well.

- George Soros

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

- Winston Churchill

Keep costs low and spirits high, and the people of Southwest Airlines will keep LUV in the air.

- Herb Kelleher

I think the most important thing that I think everyone in America must have is belief that wherever they live, whatever station they have in life, that the American dream is alive and well. I think the fracturing of trust and confidence is in the American dream.

- Howard Schultz

Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris.

- Peter Thiel

Man was designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness.

- Zig Ziglar

Use technology to remind people that we are really human and civilization is meant to connect together. Civilization is meant to be easy, and the technology to completely disappear. And should be easy to pick up.

- Jack Dorsey

swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table.

- Dale Carnegie

I was leading a lot of idea and the vision for where the product was going. Ev [Evan Williams] was funding and supporting what we were doing. He put the shelter over our heads. And Biz [Stone] was just an amazingly creative guy.

- Jack Dorsey

What we do not see, what most of us never suspect of existing, is the silent but irresistible power which comes to the rescue of those who fight on in the face of discouragement.

- Napoleon Hill

Positive thinking is more than just a tagline. It changes the way we behave. And I firmly believe that when I am positive, it not only makes me better, but it also makes those around me better.

- Harvey Mackay

With the intensity of the first three NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series races at Atlanta Motor Speedway, fans have been treated to exciting finishes each race. Fans can expect nothing less than the same for the John Deere 200.

- Ed Clark

Let’s find and remedy all our weaknesses before our enemies get a chance to say a word. That is what Charles Darwin did. …When Darwin completed the manuscript of his immortal book The Origin Of Species he realized that the publication of his revolutionary concept of creation would rock the intellectual and religious worlds. So he became his own critic and spent another 15 years checking his data, challenging his reasoning, and criticizing his conclusions.

- Dale Carnegie

Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.

- Peter Thiel

One thing I’ve always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they’ll tell you, ‘We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.

- Bill Gates

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software.” We had dreams about the impact it could have.

- Bill Gates

I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

Most of us have never felt at a disadvantage because we did not receive any inheritance. About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent.

- Thomas J Stanley

When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, ‘Let’s get a better board’ can be helpful.

- Ben Horowitz

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.

- Sergey Brin

Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.

- W. Clement Stone

Sure, ideas that spread, win, but ideas that don’t get spoken always fail.

- Seth Godin

If you pay that price daily by planning and preparing and working to become the right kind of person, then you can legitimately expect to have all that life has to offer.

- Zig Ziglar

when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good.

- Dale Carnegie

What’s important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn’t satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn’t right, or if the offerings aren’t right, it’s the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don’t get hung up on zeros.

- Jack Welch

The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves

- Ray Kroc

My parents were the same in the pulpit as they were at home. I think that’s where a lot of preachers’ kids get off base sometimes. Because they don’t see the same things at both places.

- Joel Olsteen

I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.

- Winston Churchill

Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn’t mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It’s about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.

- Steve Martin

Don’t be intimidated as you design your pitch. The fact is that nobody will come to you at first. You must be the aggressor, or you will not be heard.

- Michael Levine

If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.

- Ben Horowitz

They need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Walmart on something like toothpaste. That’s not what they customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out front on the door and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and that register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Walmart tries to duplicate, ad we try awfully hard, we can’t really do it.

- Sam Walton

Self-disciplined begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think, you can’t control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.

- Napoleon Hill

I’m just always looking forwards. I spend very little time, looking backwards.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The time will never be right to start. Today is your day. Study successful people, do what they do, and you too will be successful.

- Clay Clark

Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

- Harry Truman

I think I will always have a connection to young people, to try to bring their voices to the polls, bring their voices wherever they can make a difference.

- Russell Simmons

Today, we exaggerate the differences between left-liberal egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their common indefinite attitude.

- Peter Thiel

Sometimes God gives instructions that go against conventional wisdom, such as treating people kindly when they’re hateful. Who really wants to do that? Instructions like that my not always make sense, so that’s why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.

- George Foreman

The person who has technical knowledge plus the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people—that person is headed for higher earning power.

- Dale Carnegie

We modeled our employee stock ownership plan after Sam’s, and it worked well for us.

- Bernie Marcus

Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn’t. It’s just the opposite. What I think is brutal and false kindness is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don’t belong – just when the options are limited and they’re putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.

- Jack Welch

Out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

- Ben Horowitz

The only antidote is simplicity. The simplicity of leading through truth and trust. Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter. In every decision, in every action. Truth is a determined pursuit, a personal and unquenchable fire, burning to know what is really happening inside the company and out.

- Jack Welch

I’m just like so many women – I was frustrated, I had these white pants that I had spent a lot of money on, and you get home and you think, ‘What am I really supposed to wear under this?’ So it was a frustrated consumer moment.

- Sara Blakely

Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness – great wealth, great return, great satisfaction, great reputation, and great joy

- Jim Rohn

you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven.

- Timothy Ferriss

…Treasure what it means to do a day’s work. It’s our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it’s certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day’s work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you’ll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.

- Seth Godin

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.

- Jack London

You were not created to just get by with an average, unrewarding, or unfulfilling life. God created you to leave your mark on this generation.

- Joel Olsteen

When you expect your employees to act like adults, they generally do. If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.

- Ben Horowitz

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.

- Jeff Bezos

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them. The first month cost perhaps $200 more than if I had been micromanaging.

- Timothy Ferriss

Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one.

- Joel Olsteen

There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.

- Phil Knight

Chinese consumption, particularly high-end consumption, is booming.

- Wang Jianlin

We’d love to be involved with the creation of something very special, something quite large and something quite exciting.

- Richard Branson

Wally Amos is the classic example of a man who gets up again and again.

- Zig Ziglar

Real change rarely comes from the front of the line. It happens from the middle or even the back. Real change happens when someone who cares steps up and takes what feels like a risk. People follow because they want to, not because you can order them to.

- Seth Godin

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