On my grandfather’s tombstone, you will find his favorite Marx quote: “Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
What we maybe should’ve realized sooner was that we are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber. And this political race is happening in every major city in the world. And because this isn’t about a democracy, this is about a product, you can’t win 51 to 49. You have to win 98 to 2.
- Travis Kalanick
The austerity policies for the mainland property market will remain intact in 2011.
- Lee Shau Kee
I would summarize the quarter as a solid quarter from a revenue and earnings per share perspective and a strong quarter from an orders perspective.
- John Chambers
You can learn from everybody.
- Sam Walton
The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.
- Elon Musk
In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
- Warren Buffett
Those two priceless abilities: first, the ability to think. Second, the ability to do things in the order of their importance.
- Dale Carnegie
Each close you use should be an educational process by which you are able to raise the value in the prospect’s mind.
- Zig Ziglar
Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.
- Oprah Winfrey
Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn’t. It’s just the opposite. What I think is brutal and false kindness is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don’t belong – just when the options are limited and they’re putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.
- Jack Welch
Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.
- Peter Thiel
Blackjack is very scientific. There’s always a right answer and a wrong answer. Do you take a card, increase your bet, bet big or bet small. There’s absolutely a right and wrong answer.
- Charles Ergen
The prizes of life are at the end of each journey, not near the beginning, and it is not given to me to know how many steps are necessary in order to reach my goal. Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner.
- Og Mandino
If you say you want to automate cars and save people’s lives, the skills you need for that aren’t taught in any particular discipline. I know – I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.
- Larry Page
I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment…..the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy. A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.
- Peter Drucker
Happens to every guy sometimes this does.
- Yoda
I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
I’ve always been interested in science – one of my favourite books is James Watson’s ‘Molecular Biology of the Gene.
- Bill Gates
Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest. Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends.
- Dale Carnegie
The choice to be excellent begins with aligning your thoughts and words with the intention to require more from yourself.
- Oprah Winfrey
Companies such as Echelon are poised to help drive this change with Cisco and extend the power of the Internet from business to the home.
- John Chambers
If you are going to be successful, you must develop persistence. How do you do that? It is not easily condensed in one simple statement, but one thing you can be sure of is that your must define your purpose.
- Zig Ziglar
If you’re a Wal-Mart of a Meijer you can draw the shoppers without using signs to advertise your specials, … But when you’re a little guy, you really depend on those signs.
- Michael Ward
War will find us whether we are ready or not.
- Winston Churchill
In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.
- Elon Musk
There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
- Peter Thiel
Make a point to continually search for a better way of doing things, even when things are going well, to ensure that a better alternative has not been overlooked and to keep your creative talents in practice.
- John C. Maxwell
You read these management books that say, ‘These are the hard things about running a company.’ But those aren’t really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.
- Ben Horowitz
To make a ton of steel on and half tons of iron stone has to be mined, transported by rail a hundred miles to the Lakes, carried by boat hundreds of miles, transferred to cars, transported by rail 150 miles to Pittsburgh; one and a half tons of coal must be mined and manufactured into coke and carried 50 (odd) miles by rail; and one ton of limestone mined and carried 150 miles to Pittsburgh. How then could steel be manufactured and sold without loss at 3 pounds for 2 cents. This, I confess seemed to me incredible, and little less than miraculous, but it was so.
- Andrew Carnegie
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
- Dale Carnegie
Put time limits on each item. Set an agenda for your meeting and your trips to Disney World.
- David Robinson
First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.
- Dale Carnegie
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
- Zig Ziglar
At the end, the acquisition of wealth is ignoble in the extreme. I assume that you save and long for wealth only as a means of enabling you the better to do some good in your day and generation.
- Andrew Carnegie
A good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.
- Thomas Edison
My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.
- Dale Carnegie
If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that’s not going to promote healthiness.
- Larry Page
The truth is that finding happiness in what you do every day is so imperative.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The Loire Valley is grossly underestimated. The prices are fair, and the wines are real.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
- Winston Churchill
Rich dad said to Mike and me, I am so rich because I’ve made more financial mistakes than most people. Each time I made a mistake, I learned something new. In the business world, that something new is often called experience.
- Robert Kiyosaki
We can never own property (because of property taxes) we can just control it (by renting it from the government by paying taxes).
- Robert Kiyosaki
Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.
- Jack Ma
That’s your opportunity–to approach your work in a way that generates unique learning and interactions that are worth sharing.
- Seth Godin
You cannot consistently perform in a manner which is inconsistent with the way you see yourself.
- Zig Ziglar
Play by the rules, but be ferocious.
- Phil Knight
Success is…knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.
- John C. Maxwell
We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.
- Steve Ballmer
Satan knows, if you are against YOURSELF you will never fulfill your destiny. :(
- Joel Olsteen
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
- Dale Carnegie
Any area of achievement in your life required you to stick with the basics until you became great…it’s not about learning 4,000 moves but about doing just a handful of moves 4,000 times.
- Chet Holmes
It’s better to have a hundred people that love you, than a million people that sort of like you.
- Paul Graham
Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.
- Ray Dalio
Some companies out there quote a start of production that is substantially in advance of when customers get their cars.
- Elon Musk
In between personal sales (salespeople obviously required) and traditional advertising (no salespeople required) there is a dead zone.
- Peter Thiel
We must use time creatively.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s unconscionable that cancer patients get the wrong diagnosis 30 percent of the time and that it takes so long to treat them with appropriate drugs for their cancer.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I’d try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, ‘This is the end.’ I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.
- Rupert Murdoch
Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.
- Russell Simmons
If you don’t have public hangings for bad culture in a company, if you don’t take people out and let them say, they went home to spend more time with the family. It’s crazy.
- Jack Welch
You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.
- Warren Buffett
People might not think that, but the Republicans have all of the cards. And this is the time to get rid of Obamacare. This is the time to make the great deal.
- Donald Trump
We had been kicked out of one bank… The second, it was touch and go…
- Phil Knight
To live your best life now, you must learn to trust God’s timing, you may not think He’s working, but you can be sure that right now, behind the scenes, God is arranging all the pieces to come together to work out His plan for your life.
- Joel Olsteen
We build dwellings and thereafter they build us.
- Winston Churchill
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
- Henry David Thoreau
I seek constantly to improve my manners and graces, for they are the sugar to which all are attracted.
- Og Mandino
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
- Elon Musk
If people look inward, they would see the opportunities for greatness.
- Aliko Dangote
Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.
- Ben Horowitz
PR is gift-wrapping. If you package a bracelet in a Tiffany box, it will have a higher perceived value than if you presented it in a Kmart box.
- Michael Levine
How will your new job differ from your current job?
- Ben Horowitz
There is no more important economic policy issue today than helping our nation remain the global innovation leader. To do this, our leadership must focus on an aggressive agenda to support math and science education, patent litigation reform, healthcare information technology, and research and development. We thank President Bush for his leadership and urge all members of Congress to address these issues in a comprehensive fashion to get the job done.
- John Chambers
In the journey of entrepreneurship, tenacity of purpose is supreme.
- Aliko Dangote
To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.
- Joel Olsteen
In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris. You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities.
- Peter Thiel
Every day were saying, ‘How can we keep this customer happy?’ How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don’t, somebody else will.
- Bill Gates
To be awake is to be fully present, no noise, just you and God. Most of us only have seconds of full consciousness. To live in a state of Samadhi – that’s what we’re here for.
- Russell Simmons
We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.
- Winston Churchill
If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.
- Ray Kroc
We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.
- Walt Disney
I think I will always have a connection to young people, to try to bring their voices to the polls, bring their voices wherever they can make a difference.
- Russell Simmons
We sold ‘Seinfeld’ all over the world but it was a very specific kind of show. In some countries it went down really well, in others they hated it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Whether you’re 9 or 90, stop trying to fix the things you’re bad at, and focus on the things you’re good at.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Life’s too short” is repeated often enough to be a cliche, but this time it’s true. You don’t have enough time to be both unhappy and mediocre. It’s not just pointless, it’s painful. Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
- Seth Godin
A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.
- Winston Churchill
I have always said that everyone is in sales. Maybe you don’t hold the title of salesperson, but if the business you are in requires you to deal with people, you, my friend, are in sales.
- Zig Ziglar
This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do.
- Joel Olsteen
Value and purpose are about understanding the specific benefits you will help people receive if they receive what you have for them.
- Zig Ziglar
It is not your aptitude but your ATTITUDE that decides your altitude in life.
- Zig Ziglar
The first step is to establish that something is possible, then probability will occur.
- Elon Musk
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
You can be passionate about anything.
- Jerry Seinfeld
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’d rather have 1% of 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own.
- John D. Rockefeller
As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything. You should have an opinion on every forecast, every product plan, every presentation, and even every comment. Let people know what you think. If you like someone’s comment, give her the feedback. If you disagree, give her the feedback. Say what you think. Express yourself.
- Ben Horowitz
If we do not have time to do it right the first time when will we have time to come back and do it right again later?
- Lee Cockerell
Remember: There is a direct correlation between an increased sphere of comfort and getting what you want.
- Timothy Ferriss
