Notable Quotables

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

Wanda and Reliance are two of the largest private conglomerates in their respective countries. By joining our strengths together, we hope our cooperation will bring mutual benefits and great results.

- Wang Jianlin

I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.

- Howard Schultz

Strive to make every person feel special. After all, every person you meet is made in the image of God.

- Joel Olsteen

You cannot hang out with negative people and expect to live a positive life.

- Joel Olsteen

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner’s job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one’s own property.

- Peter Drucker

I enjoy the hunt much more than the ‘good life’ after the victory.

- Carl Icahn

Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.

- Wang Jianlin

Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that’s right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that’s better than television in terms of social connectivity.

- Reid Hoffman

There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.

- Phil Knight

You can make an internet company with 10 people and it can have billions of users. It doesn’t take much capital and it makes a lot of money — a really, really lot of money — so it’s natural for everyone to focus on those kinds of things.

- Larry Page

I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic … It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine’s works in my boyhood … it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker’s views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine’s writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, ‘What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!’ My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.

- Thomas Edison

I don’t believe that government is good at picking technology, particularly technology that is changing. By the time you get it done and go through democracy, it’s so outdated.

- Michael Bloomberg

There are two main drivers of asset class returns – inflation and growth.

- Ray Dalio

Twitter in 2000 was something that was fun to play with but something I put on the shelf to play with for another day. And that day was 2006.

- Jack Dorsey

Formal education will make you a living, self-education will make you a fortune.

- Jim Rohn

Branding is what people think about you before they even know you.

- Bryan Smith

I… had no need for cheering dreams,” he wrote. Facts are better than dreams.

- James C. Collins

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

- Seth Godin

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Outlook 2003 did create the idea of search folders and the whole Longhorn philosophy. You can see it at work in search folders, where instead of having to drop things into individual folders, and things exist only in one folder, you create these search folders and you have the criteria for the search folder.

- Bill Gates

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

- Howard Schultz

The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.

- Ben Horowitz

[In January 2011] We have built the simplest way to accept credit cards. It’s a little tiny device that we give away for free, and you just download some softwares from the app store and plug it in to your mobile phone or iPad and suddenly you can take credit cards. So if you’re a tax accountant or a lawyer or doctor or even a hair stylist, you can now accept credit cards.

- Jack Dorsey

There is always room for those who can be relied upon to delivery the goods when they say they will.

- Napoleon Hill

If you will focus on meeting other people’s needs, God will always make sure your needs are supplied. God will take care of your problems for you.

- Joel Olsteen

People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.

- Zig Ziglar

Positive thinking won’t allow you to do anything, but it will allow you to do everything better than negative thinking will.

- Zig Ziglar

Don’t be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.

- Dale Carnegie

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

- Jack London

Getting knocked down in life is a given. Getting up and moving forward is a choice.

- Zig Ziglar

By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average.

- James C. Collins

To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.

- Winston Churchill

I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.

- Henry Ford

America’s leaders need to put their feet in the shoes of working Americans.

- Howard Schultz

Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.

- John C. Maxwell

I feel like money makes you more of who you already are.

- Sara Blakely

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

- Richard Branson

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

- Winston Churchill

The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.

- P.T. Barnum

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

Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.”

- Ben Horowitz

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

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

- Bill Gates

If salespeople don’t probe well for background information, they don’t know how to launch the presentation.

- Jerry Vass

The lizard isn’t listening and the lizard doesn’t care.

- Seth Godin

Do not wait: the time will never be ‘just right’. Start where you stand, and work whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along.

- Napoleon Hill

You have in the U.S. around two million new diagnoses of cancer a year, and 13 million survivors, so you have about 10,000 patients that require analysis every day. That’s about five petabytes that need to be transmitted and computed on a daily basis.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

If the employees come first, then they’re happy….A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy, so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It’s not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.

- Herb Kelleher

When you catch a glimpse of your potential, that’s when passion is born.

- Zig Ziglar

Modern society is based on a modern idea: get the work done by replaceable cogs, by individuals programmed to do what they’re told, follow instructions and work cheap. The attraction of this system is evident by how easily ordinary organizations replace ordinary employees, and how eagerly schools indoctrinate their students.

- Seth Godin

I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.

- Ben Horowitz

The idea flow from the human spirit is absolutely unlimited. All you have to do is tap into that well. I don’t like to use the word efficiency. It’s creativity. It’s a belief that every person counts.

- Jack Welch

Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.

- Timothy Ferriss

We believe that it is better to give one a rod to fish rather than just dole out fish to them.

- Henry Sy

People don’t want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology – all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

- Peter Thiel

We’re extremely adroit at hiding our fear. 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

I don’t like to look back, and I’m always worried about the next thing rather than resting on the laurels or the degradations of the last thing.

- Steve Martin

Regardless of what position people originally took, once the decision is made, everyone supports it. That’s why it is critical that no one hold anything back during the discussion.

- Patrick M. Lencioni

Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.

- John F. Kennedy

I am thinking about launching a wine website where there is a deal and the crowd can dictate how cheap it can get.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

We, too, need to be patient, especially when it comes to reaching new goals.

- George Foreman

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If there is any one secret of success,’ said Henry Ford, ‘it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

- Dale Carnegie

My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.

- Larry Page

A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate

- Seth Godin

The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

- Dale Carnegie

You never know when a moment and a few sincere words can have an impact on a life.

- Zig Ziglar

In 2008, people who invested in hedge funds needed capital badly, but many of the funds would not return their money. However, I gave money back to any investor who requested it. It was the bottom of the market and a pretty tough time.

- Carl Icahn

The competitive advantages the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.

- Seth Godin

Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.

- P.T. Barnum

You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. It’s that simple.

- Phil Knight

You may think you’re getting the short end of the stick, but when it’s all said and done, God will make sure that you don’t lose anything truly valuable. Moreover, He’ll make sure you get your just reward. Your responsibility is to remain calm and peaceable even when those around you are not.

- Joel Olsteen

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

- Winston Churchill

Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas.

- Seth Godin

A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it’s harder to turn quickly.

- Tony Hsieh

It’s only lonely at the top if you forget all the people you met along the way and fail to acknowledge their contributions to your success.

- Harvey Mackay

If they really don’t want to buy the flats, I’ll take their deposits.

- Lee Shau Kee

When I was at Kingsoft, I was under pressure and worked hard, but the results were not satisfactory.

- Lei Jun

If you’ve found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.

- Bill Gates

I try to live what I teach. A lot of things come against us in life, but we should try to find something to be grateful for, and see each day as a gift.

- Joel Olsteen

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

It was a big momentum deal, so when the bottom comes out from under it, you have to go back to the well and start the whole thing.

- Travis Kalanick

As kids, we all worked for the company in one way or another. I got to work behind the candy counter or run the popcorn stand when I was five years old. The business was part of life, and it was always included in the dinner conversation. We learned a lot about the debt it took to open new stores, and I worried about it. I remember confiding to my girlfriend one time – crying and saying, I don’t know what we’re going to do. My daddy owes so much, and he won’t quit opening.

- Alice Walton

One thing I resent is the slur that I just support political candidates because of the business.

- Rupert Murdoch

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

- Bill Gates

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription