You’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.
- Bill Gates
I had a will to win that come from being raised poor.
- Sam Huff
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
- Thomas Edison
It’s absolutely true we set out to expose Microsoft’s covert activities, I feel very good about what we did … Maybe our investigation organization may have done things unsavory, but it’s not illegal. We got the truth out.
- Larry Ellison
One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
- Ben Horowitz
our skills and talent, but above all, be tenacious. See yourself as victorious–which means never giving up
- Donald Trump
If you say too much or mix in multiple pitches, you diffuse your goal. You must give the media a pitch they can hit.
- Michael Levine
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
- Winston Churchill
It’s what we wrestle with every single day. The intersection of comfort, danger, and safety. The balancing act between vulnerability and shame. The opportunity (or the risk) to do art. The willingness to take responsibility for caring enough to make a difference and to have a point of view.
- Seth Godin
Actually, King Abdullah, under his supervision and guidance, has established a dialogue in Saudi Arabia whereby all the population, whether Shiite or Sunnis from north, south, west or east, they can get together and exchange their views.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
- Elon Musk
Online I see people committing ‘social media suicide’ all the time by one of two ways. Firstly by responding to all criticism, meaning you’re never going to find time to complete important milestones of your own, and by responding to things that don’t warrant a response.
- Tim Ferris
My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.
- Dale Carnegie
Write your life story as if it has already happened and live it out using your faith in yourself, and in the reality that you are embracing.
- Clay Clark
If God says I’m highly favored, then I will not talk myself out of it. I believe I’m highly favored. If God says the impossible can happen, then I believe the impossible will happen.
- Joel Olsteen
I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.
- Winston Churchill
For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the products. But now we understand the most important thing we do is market the product… Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.
- Phil Knight
Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.
- Winston Churchill
Economic cycles are just like riding on a Ferris wheel.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Our teachers deserve better feedback.
- Bill Gates
Many residents have grown more cynical about government, … Sure, I want my constituents to feel good about me as their legislator, but we have to do something to restore the public’s faith in government.
- Michael Gerber
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
Well, today the Grammys is much much better than the Oscars. I think the differences in the shows are that the Grammys are much wilder. The Oscars is much more people in the industry. And people dress wilder, I think, at the Grammys.
- Steve Martin
Passion is everything. In fact, you’ve got to be borderline fanatical about what you do.
- Chris Gardner
My supply of Scotch caution never has been small; but I was apparently something of a daredevil now and then to the manufacturing fathers of Pittsburgh. They were old and I was young, which made all the difference.
- Andrew Carnegie
I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.
- Elon Musk
Hard times may have held you down, but they will not last forever. When all is said and done, you will be better off than before.
- Joel Olsteen
If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm.
- Vince Lombardi
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
- Peter Thiel
Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is my go-to song to pump myself up if I’m having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.
- Sara Blakely
I’ve always been interested in science – one of my favourite books is James Watson’s ‘Molecular Biology of the Gene.
- Bill Gates
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
- Henry Ford
I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.
- Joel Olsteen
Who you are, is who you attract.
- John Maxwell
Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.
- John F. Kennedy
Keep it simple. Tell the truth. People can smell the truth.
- Stephen Wynn
It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.
- Timothy Ferriss
The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.
- Zig Ziglar
For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them” (Matthew 25:29).
- Peter Thiel
IM is interesting because you look at your buddy list and, at a glance, see what your friends are listening to, what they’re working on, what they’re doing. The problem was that you were bound to the computer keyboard.
- Jack Dorsey
Expect to make some mistakes when you try new and different approaches. Sometimes colossal failures lead to spectacular successes.
- Harvey Mackay
Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer.
- Seth Godin
Surely, we all can look back and see things in our lives that we wish we would have done differently. But the Bible says, Make the most of each day.”4 Yesterday is gone; tomorrow may not come. You must live for today. Start right where you are. You can’t do anything about what’s gone, but you can do a great deal about what remains.
- Joel Olsteen
The elevator to success is not running, you must climb the stairs.
- Zig Ziglar
In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching.
- Bill Gates
Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
- Sam Walton
I’ve seen the promised land, and there is good news. You can have it all.
- Timothy Ferriss
Our lives change in two ways :through the people we meet and the books we read.
- Harvey Mackay
You get paid to deliver results.
- David Novak
In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done, and they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield…march straightforward.
- Winston Churchill
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
- John D. Rockefeller
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
I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.
- Jeff Bezos
In some ways, running a successful business is a bit like coaching a football team. The fundamentals of football are blocking and tackling. The fundamentals of a business are it’s governing policies andprocesses. To carry out the metaphor, touchdowns are profits. The best business idea in the world cannot survive bad execution. So when you sit down to develop your workflow, internal policies, and business structure, be merciless, probe for weaknesses and assume that the worst will happen. – Jack Nadel (Author&Entrepreneur)
- Jack Nadel
It’s amazing how people will give when you don’t ask. Many of them send money because they believe in the message.
- Joel Olsteen
Pale ink is better than the most retentive memory.
- Harvey Mackay
The air of the English is down-to-earth. They care about details; there’s a tradition, but there’s also a counter-culture: the younger generation versus the older generation and so on. But then that’s well blended into a happy balance and crystallised into common sense.
- Tadashi Yanai
I own almost 100 hotels in North America. Some of them are only in management, but some of them we have some small stakes in them.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Always keep your eyes open for people with potential.
- Napoleon Hill
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there.People will follow.
- Seth Godin
No alibi will save you from accepting the responsibility.
- Napoleon Hill
You’d believe that a patient with hypertension, if you know you have hypertension or diabetes, you would take your drug every day. The compliance rate is more like 30% or 40%. Which means that 60% of patients don’t take their drugs, and they actually go into these crises, end up in the hospital.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.
- Bill Gates
We all prospect, and don’t even know we’re doing it. When you start the dating process, you are actually prospecting for the person you want to marry. When you’re interviewing employees, you are prospecting for someone who will best fit your needs.
- Zig Ziglar
Twitter was not started because we started a company. Twitter was started because we had a good idea, and it started out of a failed company. That can happen out of any company today.
- Jack Dorsey
As you schedule individual tasks, give yourself a cushion. Mark the due date a few days ahead of the actual deadline so you have time to deal with changes or last-minute emergencies.
- Harvey Mackay
I am concerned about any attrition in customer traffic at Starbucks, but I don’t want to use the economy, commodity prices or consumer confidence as an excuse. We must maintain a value proposition to our customers as well as differentiate the Starbucks Experience. That is the key.
- Howard Schultz
Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.
- James C. Collins
Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.
- Winston Churchill
There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.
- Jeff Bezos
There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.
- Phil Knight
I like sports, and I enjoy playing basketball and lifting weights.
- Joel Olsteen
For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you [Charles de Gaulle] and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.
- Winston Churchill
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
I deal with more practical issues of the Bible.
- Joel Olsteen
God’s got you in the palm of His hand. You won’t leave one second before your time. If God wants you to be here, then you’re going to be here.
- Joel Olsteen
Every company needs people with different skill sets and passions. But early on, everybody should be willing to wear ten different hats. They can’t have the attitude that something isn’t their job or their responsibility. They have to have the MacGyver mentality and do whatever it takes to get the job done. – Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos)
- Tony Hsieh
Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.
- Winston Churchill
I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.
- Ray Dalio
I don’t shop online, but my wife buys everything at home. We buy sea crabs, fresh crabs, all kinds of things.
- Jack Ma
I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical.
- Joel Olsteen
All bibles are man-made.
- Thomas Edison
When SAP, and, specifically Hasso Plattner, said they’re going to build this in-memory database and compete with Oracle, I said. God, get me the name of that pharmacist, they must be on drugs.
- Larry Ellison
Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.
- Richard Branson
Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.
- Jack Welch
By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.
- Ben Horowitz
You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.
- Jerry Seinfeld
We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.
- Thomas Edison
The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.
- Peter Drucker
Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
- Bill Gates
Some libertarians say, ‘Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.’ But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn’t earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.
- Ben Horowitz
Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.
- Napoleon Hill
Intemperance.
- Napoleon Hill
We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
- Jeff Bezos
Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
That is what every successful person loves: the game. The chance for self-expression. The chance to prove his or her worth, to excel, to win. That is what makes foot-races, and hog-calling, and pie-eating contests. The desire to excel. The desire for a feeling of importance.
- Dale Carnegie
The potential for Twitter is spectacular and great.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
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





