For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.
- Winston Churchill
Notable Quotables
Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.
- Peter Thiel
Superstition of Prejudice.
- Napoleon Hill
Well, it’s the last step of the civil rights movement: You know, wrap your hands around some money, right?
- Russell Simmons
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
It’s almost always harder to raise capital than you thought it would be, and it always takes longer. So plan for that.
- Richard Harroch
A true entrepreneur is someone who seeks to profitably solve a problem that the world has in exchange for enough monetary compensation to achieve their dreams.
- Clay Clark
Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded assent. “Then,” continued Mr. Sloan, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.
- Peter Drucker
There’s 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.
- Bill Gates
For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.
- Steve Wozniak
In the U.S. there are many people willing to work on $9 per hour, which is causing Tasmania to lose its famous apple industry and Australia to import more and more of its fruit and food from lower cost countries. In fact, all over Australia there are warning signs of us killing or restricting our own industries.
- Gina Rinehart
I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft.
- Steve Ballmer
On scores of occassions, when I have faced emergencies, some of them so grave that my life was in jeopardy, I have been miraculously guided past these difficulties through the influence of my Invisible Counselors. My original purpose in conducting Council meetings with imaginary beings, was soley that of impressing my own subconscious mind, through the principle of auto-suggestion, with certain characteristcs which I desired to acquire. In more recent years, my experimentation has taken on a different trend. I now go to my imaginary counselors with every difficult problem which confronts me and my clients. The results are often astonishing, although I do not depend entirerely on this form of counsel.
- Napoleon Hill
This is just going to be a great event and we have an outstanding speaker.
- Jack Taylor
Essentially, whoever is successful, whoever is going to do things that make a difference, is going to be talked about.
- Mukesh Ambani
The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you’ve ever been able to create before.
- Seth Godin
Tweeting is really only good for one thing – it’s just good for tweeting… It is rewarding, because it’s just its own reward. It’s sort of like heaven.
- Steve Martin
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
Change before you have to.
- Jack Welch
They did not die because of sickness or anything but because of hunger. I remember that and how people suffered.
- Lui Che Woo
I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m an entrepreneur. I’m not a politician.
- Robin Li
Out that expending emotional labor, working without a map, and driving in the dark involve confronting fear and living with the pain of vulnerability. The artist comes to a détente with these emotions and, instead of fighting with them, dances with them. The linchpin connects as a result of the indispensable nature of her contribution. The artist, on the other hand, connects because that’s what art is. The artist touches part of what it means to be truly human and does that work again and again.
- Seth Godin
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
Pretty much everything will come to him who hustles while he waits. I believe that restlessness is discontent, and discontent is merely the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
- Thomas Edison
The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo, the job is to invent the status quo.
- Seth Godin
For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary.
- Peter Thiel
Gold is a kind of mortar and offers a form of capital preservation. We’re still bullish about gold.
- Lee Shau Kee
Whatever the trend in exchange rates or whatever the external factors, a manufacturing company is always faced with the mission of transforming itself into a company that can produce higher value-added to absorb the increase in the cost of living in the country it’s operating in.
- Fujio Mitarai
Computing shows up in many different ways. You have computing that you wear, computing that you carry. What you think of as the traditional PC market has a long tail of usage, particularly in the commercial world, but also in consumer.
- Michael Dell
Who told you that something was wrong with you?
- Joel Olsteen
Sometimes put the idea away…
- Jack Dorsey
Nevertheless, in the first years of Standard Oil, Rockefeller regularly toured his facilities and was extremely inquisitive and observant, soaking up information and assiduously quizzing plant superintendants. In his pocket, he carried a little red notebook in which he jotted suggestions or improvements and always followed up on them. He knew the terror inspired by the little red book. More than once I have gone to luncheon with a number of our heads of departments and have seen the sweat out of on the foreheads for some of them when that little red notebook was pulled out.
- Ron Chernow
I support health care for people. I want people well taken care of. But I also want health care that we can afford as a country. I have people and friends closing down their businesses because of Obamacare.
- Donald Trump
Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.
- Peter Thiel
I like the book. Do you have a problem with that? … I just think it’s a great story of somebody who stood up for what they believe in.
- Travis Kalanick
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
You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. You want to be focused on it.
- Steve Martin
All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.
- Seth Godin
Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.
- Michael Gerber
The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.
- Bill Gates
A bunch of high-IQ people with the wrong kind of ambition won’t work.
- Ben Horowitz
Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has incredible impact.
- Bill Gates
In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition.
- Peter Thiel
Unwavering courage based upon knowledge of self, and of one’s occupation. No follower wishes to be dominated by a leader who lacks self-confidence and courage. No intelligent follower will be dominated by such a leader very long.
- Napoleon Hill
We all must recognize that homeland security funds should be allocated by threat and no other reason.
- Michael Bloomberg
I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all living.
- Richard Branson
You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.
- Sam Rayburn
Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.
- Peter Drucker
Excepting for reading my numbers on Saturday morning and going to our regular meetings, I don’t have much of a routine for anything else. I always carry my little tape recorder on trips, to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.
- Sam Walton
Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.
- Ray Kroc
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.
- Robert J. Sawyer
Thomas Edison had only three months of schooling during his entire life. He did not lack education, neither did he die poor. Henry Ford had less than a sixth grade schooling but he has managed to do pretty well for himself financially.
- Napoleon Hill
I do feel, in a sense, the rules of engagement for citizenship has changed, and we must encourage other people to speak up and to take action.
- Howard Schultz
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
- Bill Gates
The world today is ruled by harassed politicians absorbed in getting into office or turning out the other man so that not much room is left for debating the great issues on their merits.
- Winston Churchill
The problem with New Year’s resolutions – and resolutions to ‘get in better shape’ in general, which are very amorphous – is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn’t work. I don’t care if you’re a world-class CEO – you’ll quit.
- Timothy Ferriss
If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
- Warren Buffett
Ironically, it is exactly because we are a city that embraces freedom, that welcomes everyone and encourages their dreams, that New York remains on the front lines in the war on terror.
- Michael Bloomberg
Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. And once they arrive at Goldman, they find that even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It’s still optimistic—you wouldn’t play in the markets if you expected to lose—but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.
- Peter Thiel
Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!
- Og Mandino
But there seems to be little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination or his knowledge.
- Peter Drucker
You can take pride in yourself without comparing yourself to anybody else. If you run your race and be the best that you can be, then you can feel good about yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
Sometimes you may have to trade places with someone who is hurting.
- Joel Olsteen
My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.
- Steve Jobs
Don’t waste your time trying to win people over that can never be won over.
- Joel Olsteen
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.
- Winston Churchill
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
The goal is to be able to live your life the way Michael Jordan played basketball, or Marvin Gaye sang a song. To be able to feel the way you feel when you laugh at a joke, but to feel that way all the time.
- Russell Simmons
We’re profitable and have the potential to be very profitable, … We generate cash from operations of over $1 billion per quarter. We have $19 billion in cash and equivalents in an industry that is in debt. We’ve gained more market share than we’ve ever gained in this last quarter. We’ve got the customer loyalty and strategy for where the industry’s going, which is combining networks for service providers and enterprises. So I’m very optimistic about our future if we execute right.
- John Chambers
Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.
- Henry Ford
A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.
- Peter Thiel
Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.
- John C. Maxwell
The most “successful” companies seemed to embrace a sort of anti-business model where they lost money as they grew.
- Peter Thiel
Any time is a good time to start a company.
- Ron Conway
Developing a customer who loves the business so much that they become an unpaid and passionate marketer for the company.
- Clay Clark
I’m constantly amazed that owners and managers of all businesses don’t train their people to call the person who pays by credit card by name. It definitely makes the customer feel good and will be a factor in bringing them back to your place of business.
- Zig Ziglar
Pain, suffering, death I feel. Something terrible has happened. Young Skywalker is in pain. Terrible pain.
- Yoda
Everything in our society is so purposeful.
- Sara Blakely
The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American.
- Winston Churchill
Any business today that embraces the status quo as an operating principle is going to be on a death march.
- Howard Schultz
What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question, and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at the very least handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open as they will. Read on from the first sentence that turns the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
- Winston Churchill
You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.
- Joel Olsteen
I think every Internet user likes personalization.
- Ma Huateng
Let go of yesterday. Let today be a new beginning and be the best that you can, and you’ll get to where God wants you to be.
- Joel Olsteen
If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.
- Napoleon Hill
Facing a market which awaited exploration and development, the Group decided to become a pioneer in its economic reform by taking up the responsibility to engage in the development of the Mainland.
- Cheng Yu-tung
There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice
- Simon Sinek
I felt like Samson with a fresh haircut. But that dream of what the company could be sustained me.
- Ray Kroc
Today is our most precious possession. It is our only sure possession.
- Dale Carnegie
Motivation is the fuel, necessary to keep the human engine running.
- Zig Ziglar
Look at all the billionaires. If I know 15 billionaires, I know 13 unhappy people.
- Russell Simmons
I am a man of simple tastes easily satisfied with the best.
- Winston Churchill
Everything in life is luck.
- Donald Trump
Turn your wounds into wisdom.
- Oprah Winfrey
I think that business book reporting, it’s all Jim Collins, it’s the story of victory; it’s success bias over and over again.
- Ben Horowitz
A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.
- Winston Churchill
You can change your world by changing your words… Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.
- Joel Olsteen
As an entrepreneur, remove obstacles for your team. If there is anything that is holding the team back, get it out of the way.
- David Nilssen
