Notable Quotables

But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.

- Peter Thiel

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. … The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

- Larry Ellison

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.

- Napoleon Hill

I’m not a politician. I only want to help relieve the suffering in communities, and I want to help people see their community in each other.

- Russell Simmons

During their lifetimes, every man and woman will stumble across a great opportunity. Sadly, most of them will simply pick themselves up, dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing ever happened.

- Winston Churchill

The great ambition should be to excel all others engaged in the same occupation.

- P.T. Barnum

There’s an entire universe in every single tweet, and it all really depends on the content as far as how it’s going to spread.

- Jack Dorsey

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

- Bill Gates

I have ways of making money that you know nothing about…(if you’re firm won’t sell) you will stand alone, Your firm can never make any more money in Cleveland. No use trying to do business in competition with Standard Oil Company. If you do (continue to fight) it will end in your being wiped out.

- John D. Rockefeller

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

- Dale Carnegie

Cherish you visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blue prints of your ultimate achievements.

- Napoleon Hill

Stepping back from almost any situation with an underperformer, it’s always easy to see the solution. They need to move on—sooner rather than later. Up close, however, organizations tend to draw out departures, as people fret about the employee’s emotional reaction to being let go. Oftentimes, managers feel guilty about putting a friend out of work, or remorseful they didn’t give candid enough feedback along the way, or both.

- Jack Welch

The thought of my mortality – I think about it a lot. I find it motivating. It can be any time that your number’s up.

- Sara Blakely

The secret of your success is found in your daily routine

- John Maxwell

We decided that instead of avoiding our competitors, or waiting for them to come to us, we would meet them head-on. It was one of the smartest strategic decisions we ever made. In fact, if our story doesn’t prove anything else about the free market system, it erases any doubt that spirited competition is good for business – not just for customers, but the companies which have to compete with one another too. Our competitors have honed and sharpened us to an edge we wouldn’t have with out them. We wouldn’t be nearly as good as we are today without Kmart, and I think they would admit we’ve made them a better retailer. One reason Sears fell so far off the pace is that they wouldn’t admit for the longest time that Wal-Mart and Kmart were their real competition. They ignored both of us, and we both blew right by them.

- Sam Walton

I try to keep in touch with the details… I also look at the product daily. That doesn’t mean you interfere, but it’s important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what’s happening.

- Rupert Murdoch

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.

- Winston Churchill

I think Ronald Reagan was one of the great presidents, period, not just recently. I thought he had the demeanor. I thought he had the bearing. I thought he had the thought process.

- Donald Trump

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

- Ben Horowitz

Ten or twelve men, especially between brothers and between fathers and sons; but the offspring of these unions are counted as the children of the man with whom a particular woman cohabited first.

- Winston Churchill

I don’t focus on the critics. Everyone who is making any difference in any field has critics. As long as I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, then I don’t worry about it.

- Joel Olsteen

We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade. We don’t decide for you.

- Larry Ellison

At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun ‘at work’ and getting paid for it!

- Zig Ziglar

Law of Credibility – Don’t say anything you can’t prove. Be able to prove anything you say.

- Jerry Vass

Every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit

- Napoleon Hill

And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.

- Reid Hoffman

Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: 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

I loved the work – and that’s an important point: To succeed in retail, you have to love it. The process of bringing items in, displaying them attractively, and seeing them miraculously change into actual cash in the drawer has to gt your blood racing. You can triple the sale of an item just by how and where you display it.

- David Green

One can get anything if he is willing to help enough others get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

A great business is seldom if ever built up, except on lines of the strictest integrity. A reputation for cuteness and sharp dealing is fatal in great affairs. Not the letter of the law, but the spirit, must be the rule. The standard of commercial morality is now very high. A mistake made by any one in favor of the firm is corrected as promptly as if the error were in favor of the other party. It is essential to permanent success that a house should obtain a reputation for being governed by what is fair rather that what is merely legal. A rule which is adpoted and adhered to has given greater returns than one would believe possible, namely; always give the other party the benefit of the doubt. This course does not apply to the speculative class (the stock market). An entirely different atmosphere pervades that world. Men are only gamblers there. Stock gambling and honorable business are incompatible. In recent years it must be admitted that the old fashioned banker, like Julius S. Morgan of London has become rare.

- Andrew Carnegie

Definiteness of purpose is the starting point from which one must begin. He recognized, too that definiteness of purpose of takes on animation, life, and power when backed by a burning desire to translate that purpose into its material equivalent. – Napoleon Hill (on leadership and vision)

- Napoleon Hill

Pick a movement. Pick something you believe in. Pick something you want to have an impact in and then question every single thing and be a founder, and be an entrepreneur inside those organizations and inside that movement.

- Jack Dorsey

I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know ‘No, he couldn’t have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.’

- Steve Wozniak

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

- Bill Gates

Your job should make you want to get out of bed

- Tony Hsieh

I’m a creative guy. And I only do businesses as a result of like I’ve – I’m try to find what my gifts are and give them immediately. As soon as I get them and I understand, I give them back.

- Russell Simmons

You can dramatize your ideas in business or in any other aspect of your life. It’s easy.

- Dale Carnegie

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

- Henry Ford

Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.

- Seth Godin

We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture.

- Phil Knight

Property prices depend mainly on the supply and demand of a particular point in time, in much the same way as the price for a commodity is fixed.

- Lee Shau Kee

I heard about this man who fell into a pit, and while he was down there several people came by and offered their opinions. The Pharisee said, You deserve to be in the pit.” The Catholic said, You need to suffer while you’re in the pit.” The Baptist said, If you’d been saved, you wouldn’t have fallen into the pit.” The charismatic said, Just confess I’m not in the pit.” The mathematician said, Let me calculate how you fell into the pit.” The IRS agent said, Have you paid taxes on that pit?” The optimist said, Things could be worse.” The pessimist said, Things will get worse.

- 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

Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used them….

- Thomas Edison

People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.

- Joseph Campbell

Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.

- Joel Olsteen

If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.

- Peter Thiel

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

About 80% of our locations are second-generation. In other words, the building used to be, say, a Wal-Mart that moved out to become a Super Wal-Mart, or a Kmart that closed. It seems that such a site becomes available almost every year in every city.

- David Green

That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.

- Ben Horowitz

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

- Winston Churchill

You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.

- John C. Maxwell

I thought ‘Borat’ was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn’t some studio-produced script with 14 writers.

- Steve Martin

The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.

- Jeff Bezos

People with the right kind of ambition would not likely use the word play to describe their effort to work as a team to build something substantial. Finally, people who use the “me” prism find it natural and obvious to speak in terms of “building out my résumé” while people who use the “team” prism find such phrases to be somewhat uncomfortable and awkward, because they clearly indicate an individual goal that is separate from the team goal.

- Ben Horowitz

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

- Warren Buffett

The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting goals and achieving them. Even the most tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through each day convinced that every task, no matter how menial or boring, brings you closer to fulfilling your dreams.

- Og Mandino

Competitiveness is really what it costs you per man-hour to get you what you want. In other words, there’s an education level that plays into the mix and so if it’s inexpensive to buy an hour of real good education in places like China versus the U.S., that factors in.

- Ray Dalio

In our day Capital, Business Ability, and Manual Labor are the legs of a three-legged stool. While the three legs stand sound and firm, the stool stands; but let any one of the three weaken and break, let it be pulled out or struck out, down goes the stool to the ground. And the stool is of no use until the third leg is restored.

- Andrew Carnegie

Even god doesn’t propose to judge a man till his last days, why should you and I?

- Dale Carnegie

the major fears of modern man could be boiled down to two things: too much e-mail and getting fat.

- Timothy Ferriss

Since we happened to be good at shoes, we thought we could be successful with casual shoes. But we got our brains beat out.

- Phil Knight

In many places where coffee is grown, deforestation is a major issue. With Starbucks’ position in the marketplace and the respect and relationships we have, we can – and have, in some cases – been able to educate and influence people.

- Howard Schultz

It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

- Elon Musk

I’ve seen the promised land, and there is good news. You can have it all.

- Timothy Ferriss

if you want to achieve consistent performance, you need both parts of a 20 Mile March: a lower bound and an upper bound, a hurdle that you jump over and a ceiling that you will not rise above, the ambition to achieve and the self-control to hold back.

- James C. Collins

Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.

- Zig Ziglar

You don’t drown by falling into water. You only drown if you stay there.

- Zig Ziglar

I encourage all my key people to bring their mobiles when they travel.

- Raymond Kwok

I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.

- Larry Ellison

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

- Napoleon Hill

You can’t jump to vegan if you’re not. Some people are absolute. Some people are able to be gradual.

- Russell Simmons

Properly run startups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Too often the investment in people stops there.

- Ben Horowitz

A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

- Peter Thiel

To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother’s keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .

- Thomas Edison

When you own your choices, you own their consequences.

- Jack Welch

So go ahead. Fall down. The world looks different from the ground.

- Oprah Winfrey

I’m a physician. I’ve been blessed with ideas and resources to use technology to make the world a better place. That’s what I would like to leave behind.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

I didn’t think I would come to this conclusion — but eventually I came to the conclusion that more information is better, even if it is not as full as we would like to see.

- Sergey Brin

Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.

- Steve Ballmer

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

- Richard Branson

If you are not in the process of becoming the person you want to be, you are automatically engaged in becoming the person you don’t want to be.

- Dale Carnegie

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.

- Walt Disney

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

Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right.

- Dale Carnegie

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