Notable Quotables

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Buddha said: ‘Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love,’ and a misunderstanding is never ended by an argument but by tact, diplomacy, conciliation and a sympathetic desire to see the other person’s viewpoint.

- Dale Carnegie

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

- Jeff Bezos

Nobody wanted to believe Jack Ma.

- Jack Ma

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

- Ben Horowitz

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

- Bill Gates

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

- Steve Jobs

Post-9/11, we saw an immediate uptick in the amount of people in our stores, all over the country. People wanted that human connection. We are not going to fracture the Starbucks experience.

- Howard Schultz

It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor.

- Ray Kroc

You have to take away some of tax breaks for the wealthy, and you have to cut back on some entitlements. Because, unless we do all of these things, it just doesn’t work. And what’s good theater and what’s good politics isn’t necessarily good economic policy.

- Michael Bloomberg

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

- Dale Carnegie

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

- Winston Churchill

Starbucks is committed to evolving and enhancing our customer experience with innovative and wholesome food offerings.

- Howard Schultz

But Governments and peoples do not always take rational decisions. Sometimes they take mad decisions, or one set of people get control who compel all others to obey and aid them in folly.

- Winston Churchill

Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We’ll break out of it. It takes time.

- Warren Buffett

I think that any wealth creates a sense of trusteeship… it is characteristic of the new generation which has created wealth to have some amount of responsibility for it.

- Azim Premji

That’s one of our biggest challenges – getting the people to the product immediately in a consistent way.

- Jack Dorsey

Bill Campbell developed an excellent methodology for measuring executives in a balanced way that will help you achieve this. He breaks performance down into four distinct areas.

- Ben Horowitz

Jim Collins, in his bestselling book Good to Great, demonstrates through massive research and comprehensive analysis that when it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates. The core reason is knowledge. Knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, and more tends to be far more difficult to acquire than the skills required to manage a larger organization.

- Ben Horowitz

Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.

- John C. Maxwell

This approach appeals to the media’s innate curiosity.Whereas a fastball stresses logic over emotion, the curveball stresses emotion over logic.

- Michael Levine

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.

- Oprah Winfrey

You cannot perform in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself.

- Zig Ziglar

The future may be made up of many factors but where it truly lies is in the hearts and minds of men. Your dedication should not be confined for your own gain, but unleashes your passion for our beloved country as well as for the integrity and humanity of mankind.

- Li Ka-shing

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

You can win more friends with your ears than with your mouth. People who feel like they’re being listened to feel accepted and appreciated. They feel like they’re being taken seriously and what they say really matters.

- Harvey Mackay

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.

- Bill Gates

In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled “What Are We Not Doing?

- Ben Horowitz

I have no interest in going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. I’m just not that kind of dude.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, you’ll never end up with a nag.

- Zig Ziglar

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

I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.

- Walt Disney

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

- Joel Olsteen

I told [John Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb’, etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly.

- Thomas Edison

It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you.

- Ben Horowitz

There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can.

- Henry Ford

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

- Steve Jobs

This presents a very curious phenomenon. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 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). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what’s critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur) will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace.

- Timothy Ferriss

History recalls the remarkable resilience of the territory’s people.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Younglings, younglings gather ’round.

- Yoda

Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.

- Ben Horowitz

In early 2009, the property market was still being driven by pessimistic sentiment and a wait-and-see attitude, leading to a further drop in the transaction volume.

- Lee Shau Kee

When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.

- Bill Gates

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

Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

- Peter Thiel

People are the key to success or extraordinary success.

- Azim Premji

Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we’re afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.

- Seth Godin

Control, control, you must learn control!

- Yoda

I don’t use my brain about the creative thing. From a business standpoint, I instinctively do things: when I get something right, it’s never because I use my brain

- Russell Simmons

Success is about being where we are supposed to be and doing what we need to be doing.

- David Robinson

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

- Bill Gates

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.

- Peter Thiel

My father had a series of blue-collar jobs and never made more than $20,000 a year. When I was seven, he got injured on a job. That was a very important point – because of the injury, he couldn’t walk, and the company he was working for did not pay him. There was no compensation. So there was no money and no food.

- Howard Schultz

If you have enough push, you don’t have to worry about the pull.

- Zig Ziglar

As youngsters, my mother taught her children that while we might not be the smartest people around, we could be courteous, polite and considerate of others.

- Zig Ziglar

Competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking.

- Peter Thiel

You will need to find ways to do less and less to make more and more.

- Robert Kiyosaki

I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.

- Lawrence Bossidy

The first rule is not to lose. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.

- Warren Buffett

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

Remember that tomorrow when you are trying to get somebody to do something. If, for example, you don’t want your children to smoke, don’t preach at them, and don’t talk about what you want; but show them that cigarettes may keep them from making the basketball team or winning the hundred-yard dash.

- Dale Carnegie

Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night.

- Thomas Edison

Satan knows, if you are against YOURSELF you will never fulfill your destiny. :(

- Joel Olsteen

That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

- Peter Thiel

The safest plan, and the one most sure of success for the young man starting in life, is to select the vocation which is most congenial to his tastes.

- P.T. Barnum

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

- Bill Gates

Yes, iD is a machine vision and sensor browser for the physical world. That’s what we have been working on with Coca-Cola, Verizon, Bank of America and Disney to launch content when an image is recognised.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

I don’t like accidental success. It’s what Bill Gates calls ‘random,’ a term he uses with the opposite of respect.

- Masayoshi Son

If you are not confused, you don´t know what is going on.

- Jack Welch

God, You said You would restore health unto me and heal me of my wounds. You said I would live and not die. You said what is impossible with men is possible with God. When you pray.

- Joel Olsteen

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

- Anais Nin

And obviously, from our own personal point of view, the principal challenge is a personal challenge.

- Richard Branson

Don’t equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don’t let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you’d like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea.

- Harvey Mackay

Don’t just accept whatever comes your way in life. You were born to win, you were born for greatness, you were created to be a champion in life.

- Joel Olsteen

It is impossible to divide the interest of a country and a company that works on its soil.

- Vagit Alekperov

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

- Bill Gates

Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you’ll create credit… So you reach a certain point that that you can’t do that anymore… There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?

- Ray Dalio

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.

- Bill Gates

When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.

- Peter Thiel

By my count, more business leaders have failed and derailed because of arrogance than any other character flaw.

- Harvey Mackay

I don’t believe in saturation. We’re thinking and talking worldwide.

- Ray Kroc

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

- Peter Drucker

I have worked at Nike and its predecessor company for 48 years. Some might call me a short timer.

- Phil Knight

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