Notable Quotables

If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.

- Peter Thiel

Sooner or later, many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

- Seth Godin

If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman.

- Phil Knight

By combining broadband Internet, phone and video services over a single cable line, we are taking a major step towards implementing future integrated data, voice and video telecommunications on a mass market scale.

- John Chambers

Ironically, it is exactly because we are a city that embraces freedom, that welcomes everyone and encourages their dreams, that New York remains on the front lines in the war on terror.

- Michael Bloomberg

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support – a significant problem in the software industry.

- Bill Gates

Look at the product pipeline, look at the fantastic financial results we’ve had for the last five years. You only get that kind of performance on the innovation side, on the financial side, if you’re really listening and reacting to the best ideas of the people we have.

- Steve Ballmer

Passion can overcome fear – the fear of losing, of failing, of being traditional.

- Seth Godin

Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires.

- Seth Godin

If you have your health, if you have people in your life to love, you are blessed. Slow down and enjoy the simple things in life.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Jerry Seinfeld

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.

- Winston Churchill

Anyone who has held an iDevice or a smoothly machined MacBook has felt the result of Steve Jobs’s obsession with visual and experiential perfection. But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively.

- Peter Thiel

The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there’s just so many expectations on you, and there are so many people who have things that they want you to do. It’s a lot like life about that.

- Ben Horowitz

How do leaders serve their people? They may pay good wages and treat employees with respect.

- John C. Maxwell

I was raised with ‘Laurel and Hardy’ and ‘I Love Lucy’ and Jerry Lewis, and I just loved it. And I had a friend in high school and we would just laugh all day and put on skits. You know, it’s the Andy Kaufman thing or the Marty Short thing where you’re performing in your bedroom for yourself.

- Steve Martin

Entrepreneurs must think in specifics with laser-like precision.

- Jack Nadel

A good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.

- Thomas Edison

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

- Bill Gates

You will never become a category of one if you run with the pack.

- Seth Godin

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

Stones of judgment, discouragement or doubt may be thrown at you. You can’t stop them, but you can make the choice to keep your walls up and not let them affect you.

- Joel Olsteen

It’s obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.

- Elon Musk

True success is when you reach back and bring somebody along with you.

- Joel Olsteen

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

When launching something new, you have to go for it—“playing not to lose” can never be an option.

- Jack Welch

Try to build bridges of understanding. Don’t build higher barriers of misunderstanding.

- Dale Carnegie

Every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit

- Napoleon Hill

Most People have a desire to look for the exception instead of the desire to become exceptional.

- John C. Maxwell

Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

- Ben Horowitz

Well, it’s the last step of the civil rights movement: You know, wrap your hands around some money, right?

- Russell Simmons

By providing the systems that make the Internet work, Cisco is playing a major role in helping customers thrive in the explosive Internet economy. As a result, we are growing faster than all of our key competitors and have been the fastest growing and most profitable company in the history of the computer industry.

- John Chambers

Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.

- Winston Churchill

More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.

- Peter Thiel

Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that’s associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.

- Bill Gates

I absolutely don’t have $20 billion. But I’d love to, right?

- Jack Ma

It’s our obligation to use the law to the furthest possible means to protect our users’ privacy. It’s just a legal and ethical principle.

- Sergey Brin

The most common cause of fear of old age is associated with the possibility of poverty.

- Napoleon Hill

It is equally important that diversification is an ongoing process.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I think people will walk into the Starbucks store and overnight recognize the significant difference between what Starbucks represents day-in and day-out and all the other coffee companies that have been serving coffee in India for so many years.

- Howard Schultz

I’m sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn’t on our radar screen. We were just making great software.

- Bill Gates

Procrastination is the bad habit of putting of until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.

- Napoleon Hill

Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking tartar sauce with you.

- Zig Ziglar

Put all excuses aside and remember this: YOU are capable.

- Zig Ziglar

Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.

- Walt Disney

Do you know of the water and the moon? The river flows endlessly, yet it never disappears. The moon waxes and wanes, yet it never grows bigger or smaller. Therefore, if you look in the eyes of change, everything in this world changes in an instant. But if you look in the eyes of stability, everything in the world, including humanity, is eternal. Dozens of worlds have demonstrated precisely the truth of the changing universe. The changes of the water and the moon happen on their appearances, but never on their physical natures. Therefore, whether changes happen depends on people’s mind and view. Since nothing remains permanent in the world, change is just the eternal fact.

- Cheng Yu-tung

If I were to retire, I would keep my family’s interest in the company the same and say, Don’t sell.

- Sheldon Adelson

Government isn’t that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you’ve got to have commercial companies do it.

- Elon Musk

Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.

- Yoda

If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.

- Dale Carnegie

Give your good bacteria an upgrade and get your microbiome in shape. Faster fat-loss and better mental health are just two of the benefits.

- Timothy Ferriss

Perhaps your challenge isn’t finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.

- Seth Godin

There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.

- Winston Churchill

The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.

- Phil Knight

Change means opportunity for those with the experience and confidence to look to the future.

- Cheng Yu-tung

If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning.

- Larry Page

Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four. I read the front-page headlines through.

- Timothy Ferriss

If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.

- Zig Ziglar

If your offering itself isn’t remarkable, then it’s invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.

- Seth Godin

Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

- Og Mandino

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

If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.

- Sun Tzu

And then you take a look at Spaces, there is this great innovation that came out of nowhere. We have the number one blogging site in the world because of the innovation that’s there.

- Steve Ballmer

I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.

- Winston Churchill

Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself.

- Peter Thiel

One of the statistics that always amazes me is the approval of the Chinese government, not elected, is over 80 percent. The approval of the U.S. government, fully elected, is 19 percent. Well, we elected these people and they didn’t elect those people. Isn’t it supposed to be different? Aren’t we supposed to like the people that we elected?

- Bill Gates

I DECLARE I am special and extraordinary. I am not average! I have been custom-made. I am one of a kind. Of all the things God created, what He is the most proud of is me. I am His masterpiece, his most prized possession. I will keep my head held high, knowing I am a child of the most high God, made in his very image. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

The most obvious clue was sartorial: cleantech executives were running around wearing suits and ties. This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings.

- Peter Thiel

Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.

- Zig Ziglar

It’s paradoxical, but you want to identify the things that can kill you and engage them sooner. This is part of the metric behind fail fast. Of course, you’re not actually trying to fail; you want to succeed. But failing fast is much better than failing slowly, since it enables you to quickly to pivot, iterate, and redeploy capital. The one key mistake is that people tend to work first on the problems that they have the most confidence they can solve. In a good startup strategy you actually want to face death soonest because then you fail fast or get on a great path to success fast. Identify the hardest problems and try to solve those as soon as you can.

- Reid Hoffman

It is clothes. It is parts. Therefore, you combine the parts differently to create your own unique expression.

- Tadashi Yanai

When your head of sales interviews for her next job, she won’t want to say that despite the fact that she ran a global sales force with hundreds of employees, her title was “Dude.”

- Ben Horowitz

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

- John F. Kennedy

So, the judgment that you have to make is (a) is this market really much bigger (more than an order of magnitude) than has been exploited to date? and (b) are we going to be number one? If the answer to either (a) or (b) is no, then you should consider selling.

- Ben Horowitz

In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.

- Peter Thiel

This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.

- Bill Gates

School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.

- Reed Hastings

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

- Zig Ziglar

Beverages have to be created. And they’re created by looking at what trend is in, say, the fashion industry – what color’s hot right now.

- Howard Schultz

I don’t know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

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