All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake: every individual has different talents and responsibilities as well as different opportunity costs, so equal amounts will seem arbitrary and unfair from the start. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Resentment at this stage can kill a company, but there’s no ownership formula to perfectly avoid it.
- Peter Thiel
We are beginning to see the benefits of global consolidation.
- Lakshmi Mittal
Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don’t approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.
- Bill Gates
What is Oracle? It’s people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people.
- Larry Ellison
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
- Benjamin Franklin
That’s your opportunity–to approach your work in a way that generates unique learning and interactions that are worth sharing.
- Seth Godin
An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be.
- Steve Martin
Money isn’t everything… but it ranks right up there with oxygen.
- Zig Ziglar
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
I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.
- Elon Musk
At its zenith Sears accounted for more than 2 percent of all retail sales in the United States. It pioneered several innovations critical to the success of today’s most admired retailers: for example, supply chain management, store brands, catalogue retailing, and credit card sales. The esteem in which Sears’ management was held shows in this 1964 excerpt from Fortune: “How did Sears do it? In a way, the most arresting aspect of its story is that there was no gimmick. Sears opened no big bag of tricks, shot off no skyrockets. Instead, it looked as though everybody in its organization simply did the right thing, easily and naturally. And their cumulative effect was to create an extraordinary powerhouse of a company.
- Clayton M. Christensen
L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it’s just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.
- Steve Martin
My conclusion on Freewill and predestination- they are identical.
- Winston Churchill
We’re absolutely going to have a better facility.
- Ed Clark
Ultimately, broadcasters and advertisers have to change the way they do business or they run the risk of linear TV becoming obsolete.
- Charles Ergen
Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
- Ben Horowitz
I can’t read a computer screen and never use a calculator. It’s all in my head and by hand.
- Simon Reuben
We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.
- Bill Gates
Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.
- Warren Buffett
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 tell people that we must have the courage to share what we feel, but no one follows me.
- Tadashi Yanai
Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.
- Peter Thiel
Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.
- Bill Gates
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
- Steve Jobs
Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.
- Zig Ziglar
All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.
- John C. Maxwell
Nobody is going to delegate a lot of power to a secretary that they can’t control.
- Michael Bloomberg
Ow, ow, OW! On my ear you are!
- Yoda
People are afraid of failure – they don’t like to work so hard and have people keep saying, ‘No.’ I think that’s what people fear most.
- Russell Simmons
In absorbing companies, Rockefeller was secretive and asked them to continue operating under their original names and not divulge their Standard Oil Ownership. They were instructed to retain their original stationary, keep secret accounts, and not allude on paper to their Cleveland connection.
- Ron Chernow
A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.
- John Shedd
Dr. Franklin says “it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.
- P.T. Barnum
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
Don’t kill competition. Competition is healthy for businesses. It keeps you – the entrepreneur – on your toes.
- Aliko Dangote
Everything we did we were setting the tone for the world.
- Steve Wozniak
Essentially, whoever is successful, whoever is going to do things that make a difference, is going to be talked about.
- Mukesh Ambani
A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see and who sees before others see.
- Leroy Eimes
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.
- Thomas Edison
We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.
- Seth Godin
We’re not in the hamburger business. We’re in show business.
- Ray Kroc
Why do you ask so much?
- Lee Shau Kee
I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.
- Winston Churchill
My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.
- Jerry Seinfeld
One of More of the Six Basic Fears.
- Napoleon Hill
Marketing is the name we use to describe the promise a company makes, the story it tells, the authentic way it delivers on that promise.
- Seth Godin
We are in turbulent times.
- Lee Shau Kee
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
I’ve always felt it was not up to anyone else to make me give my best.
- Hakeem Olajuwon
I like to get people fired up, fill them with zeal for McDonald’s, and watch the results in their work.
- Ray Kroc
If you can’t make 40% on your money in Russia, you’re a fool.
- Simon Reuben
I feel good about being able to take bluegrass on to television like ‘Letterman’ and ‘The View,’ and I’ve heard nice things about being able to do that. I really haven’t felt any negativity toward me or my music.
- Steve Martin
The industrial age is ending, and a new one is beginning. It produces art instead of stuff and it rewards gracefulness.
- Seth Godin
You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.
- John C. Maxwell
I like the word ‘autopilot’ more than I like the word ‘self-driving.’ ‘Self-driving’ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‘Autopilot’ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.
- Elon Musk
I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known
- Walt Disney
My advice for an entrepreneur just starting out is to differentiate yourself. Why are you different? What’s important about you? Why does the customer need you?
- Sara Blakely
The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That’s a bittersweet ending.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you want to understand what drives Cisco, look at our approach to customers. The manner in which we serve our customers defines our company values and demonstrates our priorities. Cisco is proud to be honored with this important certification that recognizes the foundation of our culture — the importance that we place on ensuring our customers are successful with Cisco technology.
- John Chambers
No company has a culture, every company is a culture.
- Peter Thiel
If you spend money on what you want, you’ll beg for what you need.
- T.D Jakes
As the Readers’s Digest once said: ‘Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience.
- Dale Carnegie
I think many start-ups make mistakes because they are focusing on things that are farther ahead, and they haven’t done the work that has built the foundation to support it.
- Howard Schultz
You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.
- Jim Rohn
As bad as your situation may be, someone else always has it worse than you.
- George Foreman
When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.
- John C. Maxwell
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
Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.
- Oprah Winfrey
I want to fight poverty and ignorance and give opportunity to those people who are locked out
- Russell Simmons
When it comes to social consequences, they’ve got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it’s a difficult task.
- George Soros
Successful storytelling builds brand equity, and businesses with high brand equity don’t need to draw as much attention to themselves and their achievements as those that are still establishing their value to the customer.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I was not naturally talented. I didn’t sing, dance or act, though working around that minor detail made me inventive.
- Steve Martin
We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s flattering to people who stop you and say that you’ve helped them and all. But, again, you know, you’ve got to stay humble because as quick as you came up, you can come down.
- Joel Olsteen
If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
- Jeff Bezos
Today, all arrows point toward the biotech, nanotech, and information technology industries, and the convergence among them.
- Jack Welch
For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way.
- Timothy Ferriss
They were making a deal for a property that clearly was a property that we wanted to own, so we had to act, and act as quickly as we could, and make the offer more attractive,
- Jack Welch
The Buck Stops Here
- Harry Truman
This generation… they have a different attitude. Instead of sitting and watching something, they want to be a part of it – they’re very hedonistic and sensual.
- Stephen Wynn
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
On every occasion, we were able to rely on our unique qualities – resourcefulness, perseverance, diligence and passion for excellence – to rise above our difficulties.
- Cheng Yu-tung
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
Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.
- Rupert Murdoch
If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.
- Harvey Mackay
Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer.
- Seth Godin
Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.
- Richard Branson
In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn’t necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it.
- Seth Godin
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
- Larry Ellison
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.
- Steve Jobs
Insufficient Education (not formal education).
- Napoleon Hill
The tragedy is that society (your school, your boss, your government, your family) keeps drumming the genius part out. The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.
- Seth Godin
If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.
- Seth Godin
When the tech geeks talk, I pay close attention.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
You can learn from everybody.
- Sam Walton
The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.
- Bill Gates
I don’t care about revenues.
- Jack Ma
Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.
- Mark Zuckerberg
When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.
- Larry Ellison
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt has been described as founder of the Bull Moose Party, the man who led his troops up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, a big game hunter, family man, civic servant and a host of other things.
- Zig Ziglar
