Notable Quotables

Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.

- Peter Drucker

How can we walk away from requirements that we know to be true to pursue something that we think will help?” It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

- Ben Horowitz

It’s unconscionable that cancer patients get the wrong diagnosis 30 percent of the time and that it takes so long to treat them with appropriate drugs for their cancer.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.

- Jerry Seinfeld

It’s clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them.

- Seth Godin

Whether it’s eight o’clock in the morning or eight o’clock at night, I always try to greet others before they have a chance to speak to me.

- Zig Ziglar

Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.

- Bill Gates

We’ve used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we’re running a federal deficit that’s 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It’s more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.

- Warren Buffett

The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.

- Peter Thiel

Cisco Systems Capital will be investing in companies working on networking technology.

- John Chambers

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

- Elon Musk

Failing forward” is the ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.

- John C. Maxwell

I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family that would have killed for each other – and we still are. x

- Richard Branson

Applied Faith – Faith is a state of mind through which your aims, desires, plans and purposes may be translated into their physical or financial equivalent.

- Napoleon Hill

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

I’ve come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that’s as unique as a fingerprint – and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.

- Oprah Winfrey

Through some strange and powerful principle of mental chemistry which she has never divulged, nature wraps up in the impulse of strong desire, that something which recognizes no such word as impossible, and accepts no such reality as failure.

- Napoleon Hill

Your job should make you want to get out of bed

- Tony Hsieh

I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.

- Rupert Murdoch

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

- Henry Ford

Working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you.

- Jack Welch

One who works their tail off because they hate working for other people so much, but who has no concept of what they are doing and who justifies their poverty when anyone more successful gives them advice by saying their business is different.

- Clay Clark

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

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.

- Ben Horowitz

The market is fast-moving, fast-growing. Things that are true today may not be true tomorrow.

- Robin Li

Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.

- Thomas Edison

I think that both parties should declare the debt limit as a political weapon of mass destruction which can’t be used. I mean, it is silly to have a country that has 237 years building up its reputation and then have people threaten to tear it down because they’re not getting some other matter.

- Warren Buffett

Some of us learn from other people’s mistakes and the rest of us have to be other people.

- Zig Ziglar

When you wake up every day, you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative; an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist. It’s all a matter of perspective.

- Harvey Mackay

If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.

- Ben Horowitz

Why don’t you start believing that no matter what you have or haven’t done, that your best days are still out in front of you.

- Joel Olsteen

Niklas Zennstroem has a thorough background as a successful entrepreneur with extensive expertise in areas such as IT and online.

- Stefan Persson

Well, we have to provide the world’s best schools. We certainly don’t have them, but that’s our objective.

- Michael Bloomberg

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

- Winston Churchill

You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, not by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it.

- Carlos Castaneda

Ultimately, the goal of any public relations campaign is to either reorient or solidify the perception of a product, client, policy or event. From there nature takes its course. If the public perceives the product as good, the movie stars as sexy, the pet rock as indispensable, then the public will fork over its money. One will succeed in a P.R. campaign only if the perception fostered truly resonates with the public. People respect wisdom but obey pain.

- Michael Levine

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.

- Steve Wozniak

Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.

- Peter Thiel

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

- Stephen R. Covey

Think and Thank. Think of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.

- Dale Carnegie

We can consider 140 characters to be the full story, but it’s not. It’s just a caption. A headline for something broader.

- Jack Dorsey

Even if you are predisposed to being overweight, you’re not predestined to be fat.

- Timothy Ferriss

One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that good ones slip through.

- Seth Godin

A magnificent blueprint, a loyal team and a well-coordinated organization… the same applies from ruling a country to maintaining a family.

- Cheng Yu-tung

mejor mamá que usted puede ser. Posiblemente, yo nunca seré el mejor pastor del mundo. Quizá no seré el mejor esposo ni el mejor padre, pero he decidido ser lo mejor que yo puedo ser y no me sentiré mal conmigo. Si otra persona puede hacer lo que hago mejor que yo, que bueno, yo no estoy en una competencia ni me estoy comparando con nadie. A mi manera de pensar, ¡yo soy el mejor! Y sé que estoy haciendo lo mejor que puedo. Eso es lo que nos enseña la Escritura. Dice: Así que, cada uno someta a prueba su propia obra…

- Joel Olsteen

In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.

- Ray Dalio

The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.

- Bill Gates

(In reference to one of his first advertising sales mentors Howard Davis)… He was 6 foot 4 with silver hair…the quintessential advertising guy. He had a glass topped desk in his office because, as he put it, he like to be able to look down and see his Guccis while he worked. Howard taught me to get things done. He was very smart but he was also an animal. He exuded power and he could be very intimidating, and he knew how to use his power to get results while still managing to be a good guy. Howard’s personal style was very different from my own, but what he did teach me was how to create a sense of urgency, how to motivate performance by getting everyone’s heart pounding.

- David Novak

After its return to China, Hong Kong has become an inseparable part of this large country by exerting its business strengths to become a vital member of the country and developing its four pillar industries, namely finance, commerce, shipping and professional services.

- Cheng Yu-tung

No question about it, alot of my attitude towards money stems from growing up during a pretty hardscrabble time in our country’s history: the Great Depression.

- Sam Walton

What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions.

- Phil Knight

I’d get kicked out of buildings all day long, people would rip up my business card in my face. It’s a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.

- Sara Blakely

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

- Albert Einstein

I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.

- Reid Hoffman

Don’t grow accustomed to living with less, doing less, and being less to the point that you eventually sit back and accept it.

- Joel Olsteen

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

- Walt Disney

I’m constantly amazed that owners and managers of all businesses don’t train their people to call the person who pays by credit card by name. It definitely makes the customer feel good and will be a factor in bringing them back to your place of business.

- Zig Ziglar

Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble

- Warren Buffett

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

- Seneca

It’s not about how to get started, it’s about how to get noticed.

- Steve Case

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?

- Winston Churchill

Kremlin political intrigues are comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.

- Winston Churchill

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.

- Walt Disney

If I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

- Sir Isaac Newton

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligent and honest purpose as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

- Thomas Edison

It’s God’s will for you to live in prosperity instead of poverty. It’s God’s will for you to pay your bills and not be in debt.

- Joel Olsteen

I don’t know why you should be proud of something. It doesn’t make you any better or worse. You are what you are.

- Michael Bloomberg

In the context of body redesign, there are two fundamental MEDs to keep in mind: To remove stored fat → do the least necessary to trigger a fat-loss cascade of specific hormones. To add muscle in small or large quantities → do the least necessary to trigger local (specific muscles) and systemic (hormonal2) growth mechanisms.

- Timothy Ferriss

A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.

- Peter Thiel

Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one.

- James C. Collins

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

- Walt Disney

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

- Warren Buffett

Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe.

- Gail Devers

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

Do it now! can affect every phase of your life. It can help you do the things you should do but don’t feel like doing. It can keep you from procrastinating when an unpleasant duty faces you. But it can also help you do those things that you want to do. It helps you seize those precious moments that, if lost, may never be retrieved.

- Napoleon Hill

The recovering economic environment will lead to an increase in local demand for home purchases and the purchasing power which has accumulated in the past two years due to uncertainty surrounding the local economy will result in increased demand for residential properties, particularly for residential units of small to medium size which match well with your [Henderson] Group’s property development focus.

- Lee Shau Kee

The seed of a bamboo tree is planted, fertilized and watered. Nothing happens for the first year. There´s no sign of growth. Not even a hint. The same thing happens – or doesn´t happen – the second year. And then the third year. The tree is carefully watered and fertilized each year, but nothing shows. No growth. No anything. For eight years it can continue. Eight years! Then – after the eight years of fertilizing and watering have passed, with nothing to show for it – the bamboo tree suddently sprouts and grows thirty feet in three months!

- Zig Ziglar

AP pleaded guilty to criminal theft of our software. Let me be clear. I’m not accusing SAP of anything. What did SAP do? Did you engage in criminal behavior and steal lots of Oracle software? Yes. That’s SAP. Who was CEO when you were doing all this criminal stuff? Leo.

- Larry Ellison

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

- Bill Gates

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier.

- Bill Gates

A baboon in a forest is a matter of legitimate speculation, a baboon in a zoo is an object of public curiosity, but a baboon in your wife’s bed is a cause of the gravest concern.

- Winston Churchill

Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining – it bores everybody else, does you no good, and doesn’t solve any problems.

- Zig Ziglar

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t spend a whole lot of time following soccer. But as I have traveled around the world to better understand global development and health, I’ve learned that soccer is truly universal. No matter where I go, that’s what kids are playing. That’s what people are talking about.

- Bill Gates

The greatest business people I’ve met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.

- Michael Gerber

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.

- Jerry Seinfeld

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