Notable Quotables

Be candid with everyone. Candor is the biggest dirty little secret in business?

- Jack Welch

L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it’s just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.

- Steve Martin

We’re totally legal, like totally legal, and the government is telling us to shut down. And you can either do what they say or you can fight for what you believe.

- Travis Kalanick

Risk, to some, is a bad thing, because risk brings with it the possibility of failure. It might be only a temporary failure, but that doesn’t matter so much if the very thought of it shuts you down. So, for some, risk comes to equal failure (take enough risks and sooner or later, you will fail). Risk is avoided because we’ve been trained to avoid failure.

- Seth Godin

I have thought about some kind of musical involving my music. That would be kind of interesting. I have thought of it in that way, as a creator of something, not so much a performer. So that’s in my head.

- Steve Martin

I think part of the reason we’re successful so far is that originally we didn’t really want to start a business.

- Larry Page

Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors—maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother’s recipe—your business is unlikely to survive.

- Peter Thiel

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

- Larry Page

How you look, talk, and market your business is what should be keeping everyone busy.

- Bryan Smith

Assume employees are going across a lot of networks. So you have to build in security from the home to any number of networks.

- John Chambers

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

- Henry Ford

We all know far too many stories where the third generation just destroys everything that the first two have built up, and I certainly hope my family are different because I’ve worked too hard and my father has worked too hard for it to be given away.

- Gina Rinehart

Jobs and businesses are just vehicles to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

- Clay Clark

What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.

- Bill Gates

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

My personal opinion is that I’m in the media too much. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.

- Viktor Vekselberg

I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it. I knew there were other places, and there was another way of being.

- Oprah Winfrey

Money won’t make you happy… but everybody wants to find out for themselves.

- Zig Ziglar

The most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of the civilization without its mercy.

- Winston Churchill

Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.

- Henry Ford

If you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big.

- Donald Trump

Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.

- Jeff Bezos

I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us- everything that exists – proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.

- Thomas Edison

But what do average people do? The exact opposite. If they don’t like a thing, they bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say nothing.

- Dale Carnegie

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

- Bill Gates

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.

- Winston Churchill

Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

- Confucius

Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it’s really let us down.

- Bill Gates

Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it’s cute but boring and expensive.

- P.J. O'Rourke

The Chinese market is a very good expansion opportunity for us, and we will continue looking to buy stakes and make acquisitions.

- Dhanin Chearavanont

If you believe as I do that you were born to win, you’re going to have to find your fears and start facing them.

- Zig Ziglar

the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.

- Dale Carnegie

The ‘Billionaire’ song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It’s funny.

- Bill Gates

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.

- Peter Thiel

I said a long time ago that Foursquare can make cities better. You have these augmented realities like Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook that provide these virtual nodes and instant feedback from anywhere, adding annotation around a physical places.

- Jack Dorsey

Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.

- Napoleon Hill

The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.

- Oprah Winfrey

The Arab League tells us to go in and take out Qaddafi. We’ve spent billions of dollars already with respect to the Arab League. Billions of dollars, because they told us to do it. Why aren’t they paying for it? They don’t like Qaddafi, Qaddafi’s been a terrible thorn in their side.

- Donald Trump

People respond when you tell them there is a great future in front of you, you can leave your past behind.

- Joel Olsteen

I hate recording all the shows for the week in one day, because I want to be able to mention current events and pop culture. If Madonna punches Britney in the face today, I want to reference that on ‘Wine Library TV’ tomorrow. Monday’s episode is always the best, because it’s hot off the press.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

If you want to increase your success rate, double your rate of failure.

- Thomas J Watson

Take time to be kind and to say ‘thank you.’

- Zig Ziglar

I am upset with the effect that both of these issues have had on the public,

- Michael Gerber

I’d say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that’s a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.

- Herb Kelleher

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

- Elon Musk

The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Being a CEO is the nuts! A whole jumble of thoughts come to mind: Over the top. Wild. Fun. Outrageous. Crazy. Passion. Perpetual Motion. The give and take. Meetings into the night. Incredible friendships. Fine wine. Celebrations. Great golf courses. Big decisions in the real game. Crises and pressure. Lots of swings. A few home runs. The thrill of winning and the pain of losing. It’s as good as it gets. You get paid a lot, but the real payoff is the fun…

- Jack Welch

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

- Winston Churchill

No one has any idea what’s next… the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it’s delaying the recovery.

- Stephen Wynn

We will be one of the most productive residential developers in China in the next few years.

- Lee Shau Kee

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.

- James C. Collins

I am more of a creative person. I recognize that about myself, which is why I hired my weaknesses early on. I think if most founders don’t relinquish some control, then we hold back the development of our companies.

- Sara Blakely

As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot.

- Ray Kroc

I’m not averse to making a lot of money. But where does that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that the standard by which I should measure myself? Where does that take you if you’re in my business? I think it takes you to pretty dark, corrupt places.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.

- Seth Godin

The Dip creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.

- Seth Godin

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

- Viktor E. Frankl

I’m so optimistic, I’d go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take the tartar sauce with me.

- Zig Ziglar

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

- Henry Ford

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.

- Ben Horowitz

No alibi will save you from accepting the responsibility.

- Napoleon Hill

The road to comfort is crowded and it rarely gets you there. Ironically, it’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.

- Seth Godin

My commitment is to Los Angeles, so whatever helps this continue to be a great city, that’s what I would be focused to do, and the Dodgers are certainly iconic to Los Angeles.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Money motivates neither the best people nor the best in people.

- Dee Hock

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

- Mark Zuckerberg

You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.

- Elon Musk

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful – it depends on how they’re managed.

- Ray Dalio

Role play with yourself to answer questions to a cynic, optimist, and be able play devil’s advocate.

- Maurice Kanbar

I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun.

- Reed Hastings

No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.

- Winston Churchill

Social entrepreneurs aim to combine the best of both worlds and “do well by doing good.” Usually they end up doing neither.

- Peter Thiel

Well I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

- Richard Branson

It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We appreciate size, but only if it is robust growth. Just to be big is not a target.

- Alexei Mordashov

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

- Henry Ford

India has over 20 percent of the kids born in the world. And they move around a lot.

- Bill Gates

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

- Bill Gates

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

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

- Mark Zuckerberg

To all of us comes that moment in life when we are literally tapped on the shoulder to do a very special thing unique to ourselves and our talents. What a pity if that moment finds us unprepared.

- Winston Churchill

What the Commission is seeking cuts the heart out of the strategic rationale of our deal.

- Jack Welch

Of course motivation is not permanent. But then, neither is bathing; but it is something you should do on a regular basis.

- Zig Ziglar

The Internet revolution will determine which companies survive and which get left behind, … Increasingly, the Internet is recognized as the key driver in our global economy.

- John Chambers

But no parties could live under such labels as Petitioners and Abhorrers. Instead of naming themselves they named each other. The term “Whig” had described a sour, bigoted, canting, money-grubbing Scots Presbyterian. Irish Papist bandits ravaging estates and manor-houses had been called “Tories”.

- Winston Churchill

We can’t wait for Washington. Business leaders are going to have to galvanize their own constituencies and do everything they can to demonstrate confidence in the economy, and I think that can be contagious.

- Howard Schultz

Now that I have called you on your false accusation, you are using additional smear tactics.

- George Soros

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