Notable Quotables

I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

- Bill Gates

Perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular.

- Peter Thiel

Growth is the great separator between those who succeed and those who do not. When I see a person beginning to separate themselves from the pack, it’s almost always due to personal growth.

- John C. Maxwell

To achieve stable growth, an enterprise must live up to its conviction.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission.

- Zig Ziglar

Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be. As is your faith in the dark side of the Force.

- Yoda

We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.

- Larry Page

Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.

- Sam Walton

The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job.Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.I call the process of doing your art ‘the work.’ It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that’s how you become a linchpin.The job is not the work.

- Seth Godin

Establish late-payment penalties as part of your terms and conditions and enforce them.

- Robert Kiyosaki

The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.

- Larry Ellison

…[if you] use discrimination in the selection of your Master Mind group, your objective will have been half-way reached, even before you begin to recognize it.

- Napoleon Hill

When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right.

- Rupert Murdoch

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

- Winston Churchill

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

- Winston Churchill

Lots of people will give you advice… and depending upon how well they know you, the advice might be valid or not so valid.

- Abigail Johnson

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

I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.

- Elon Musk

Politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business. Large stores, gilt signs, flaming advertisements, will all prove unavailing if you or your employees treat your patrons abruptly. The truth is, the more kind and liberal a man is, the more generous will be the patronage bestowed upon him.

- P.T. Barnum

Enduring great companies don’t exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.

- James C. Collins

College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.

- Peter Thiel

If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

- Jeff Bezos

Within the first year of launching my company, Spanx, I decided to go over to England and cold-call Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Selfridges the same way I had cold-called Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s here in the United States.

- Sara Blakely

Ahhh! Yoda’s little friend you seek!

- Yoda

While there were a number of highlights, it was probably the U.S. that topped the highlight list with strong order growth of approximately 20 percent year over year. This is better order growth than we’ve experienced in the last six quarters in the U.S..

- John Chambers

If you know you have to wait anyway, why not make a decision to enjoy your life while you’re waiting? Why not be happy while God is in the process of changing things? After all, there’s nothing we can really do to make it happen any faster. We might as well relax and enjoy our lives, knowing that at the appointed time God is going to bring his plan to pass.

- Joel Olsteen

At the end of the day, the Irvine Co. is slowly being transformed. Our long-term goal is to transform what was once an agricultural company to a development company, and to that, the next, final step is to create a large real estate investment company.

- Donald Bren

I was hooked and I would make reward and recognition one of my primary focuses as a leader

- David Novak

You can always think of something like the Xbox 360 as a super set-top box that can do everything the set-top box does, but then have the graphics to do the games as well.

- Bill Gates

I don’t think you should spend your life praying for things, but I do believe you should thank God for what He’s given you… but I think the scripture teaches us that we can pray for our dreams, pray for the big things… he’s not a small God; this God is incredible.

- Joel Olsteen

Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.

- Malcolm Forbes

Yields will rise with prices, and this will generate steady income.

- Lee Shau Kee

SpaceX has the potential of saving the U.S. government $1 billion a year. We are opposed to creating an entrenched monopoly with no realistic means for anyone to compete.

- Elon Musk

Listening is just as important in one’s home life as in the world of business.

- Dale Carnegie

I wish I could do a lot of things different. I’m not going to tell you what they are, but if I had a list of all my films right now, I’d go, ‘Okay, I’ll cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out.’ Really. But I’ve made over 40 films. How can I not have some losers in there?

- Steve Martin

Let your motto then always be ‘Excelsior’, for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.

- P.T. Barnum

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose . . . only then will you learn the game.

- Zig Ziglar

You were designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness.

- Zig Ziglar

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure

- Abraham Lincoln

Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.

- Peter Drucker

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

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them. The first month cost perhaps $200 more than if I had been micromanaging.

- Timothy Ferriss

I think that any wealth creates a sense of trusteeship… it is characteristic of the new generation which has created wealth to have some amount of responsibility for it.

- Azim Premji

It doesn’t matter who likes you or doesn’t like you, all that matters is that God likes you. He accepts you, he approves of you.

- Joel Olsteen

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

- Bill Gates

A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

- Peter Thiel

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

I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It’s got the market. It’s got consumer confidence and it’s got banks throwing – I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.

- Jack Welch

Southwest Airlines is successful because the company understands it’s a customer service company. It also happens to be an airline.

- Harvey Mackay

In Riyadh, there’s going to be a huge project that will house at least 12,000 units with inhabitants of approximately 150,000 people. It’s like a city within a city.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

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

I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: He is nothing but a boy — a little boy!

- Dale Carnegie

Well, yes, I’ve fired a lot of people. Generally I like other people to fire, because it’s always a lousy task. But I have fired many people.

- Donald Trump

Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t be afraid to assert yourself, have confidence in your abilities, and don’t let the bastards get you down.

- Michael Bloomberg

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say what is and what is definitely not possible.

- Henry Ford

The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.

- Debbi Fields

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

When you view marketing from the vantage point of the guerrilla, you realize that it’s your opportunity to help your prospects and customers succeed. They want to succeed at earning more money, building their company, losing weight, attracting a mate, becoming more fit, or quitting smoking. You can help them. You can show them how to achieve their goal. Marketing is not about you. It’s about them. I hope you never forget that.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

I like the fact that I can meet anyone now and have a conversation.

- Larry Page

Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.

- Steven Spielberg

You don’t build a business –you build people– and then people build the business.

- Zig Ziglar

There’s no single company in the whole world that has a big-scale production base and at the same time has screening and distribution channels. Wanda Group is the first one in the world.

- Wang Jianlin

It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.

- Peter Drucker

People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald’s? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly.

- Ben Horowitz

Sam phoned to tell me he was going to start a wholesale club. It was no surprise. He is notorious for looking at what everybody else does, taking the best of it, and then making it better.

- Sol Price

In the middle of that process four power plants just tripped off all at once in unison.

- Ed Clark

The patterns of success and failure we see among firms faced with sustaining and disruptive technology change are a natural or systematic result of good managerial decisions. That is, in fact, why disruptive technologies confront innovators with such a dilemma. Working harder, being smarter, investing more aggressively, and listening more astutely to customers are all solutions to the problems posed by new sustaining technologies. But these paradigms of sound management are useless—even counterproductive, in many instances—when dealing with disruptive technology.

- Clayton M. Christensen

When we think about online learning, it’s such ‘early days.’ Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, ‘Who’s every going to need more than 640K of memory?’

- Reed Hastings

Success comes to those who have an entire mountain of gold that they continually mine, not those who find one nugget and try to live on it for fifty years.

- John C. Maxwell

If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.

- Andrew Carnegie

[In January 2011] I think Twitter is so unique that we must stay independent.

- Jack Dorsey

Allowing your kids to watch TV doesn’t have to mean they have no choice but to see commercials for junk food and alcohol.

- Charles Ergen

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.

- Bill Gates

Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

An individual artist needs only a thousand true fans in her tribe. It’s enough.

- Seth Godin

One who starts a business without written plans of any kind, without a pro-forma or any concept of their overall profitability per customer, yet believes that if they work hard enough and give enough money away to those in need that eventually they will not be in need.

- Clay Clark

His strategy would be to subjugate one part of the battlefield, consolidate his forces, then move briskly on to the next conquest. His victory over the Cleveland refiners would be the first but alos the most controversial compaign of his career.

- Ron Chernow

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

- John Wooden

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.

- Harvey Mackay

The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are.

- Dale Carnegie

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

- Winston Churchill

Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.

- Ray Dalio

If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act.

- Bill Gates

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

- Peter Drucker

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.

- James C. Collins

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