Notable Quotables

There’s a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There’s a lot of sex, you know, in art. There’s a lot of naked women and men, and there’s intrigue, there’s fakery. It’s a real microcosm of the larger world.

- Steve Martin

I’ve taken those pharmacists and asked them to reach out to doctors. Doctors still misprescribe very often. They leave gaps with care. People with asthma, they don’t take their inhalers, they wait until they’re sick, and by then, it’s too late. Now we’re already running up the bills and going to emergency rooms. We’re using our pharmacist to do the things they were educated to do, not to count pills. That’s not where the value is.

- George Paz

If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil.

- Yoda

These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.

- Winston Churchill

TECHNIQUES IN HANDLING PEOPLE Principle 1—Don’t criticize, condemn or complain. Principle 2—Give honest and sincere appreciation. Principle 3—Arouse in the other person an eager want.

- Dale Carnegie

It’s paradoxical, but you want to identify the things that can kill you and engage them sooner. This is part of the metric behind fail fast. Of course, you’re not actually trying to fail; you want to succeed. But failing fast is much better than failing slowly, since it enables you to quickly to pivot, iterate, and redeploy capital. The one key mistake is that people tend to work first on the problems that they have the most confidence they can solve. In a good startup strategy you actually want to face death soonest because then you fail fast or get on a great path to success fast. Identify the hardest problems and try to solve those as soon as you can.

- Reid Hoffman

Strange as it sounds, great leaders gain authority by giving it away.

- Napoleon Hill

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.

- Peter Drucker

Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.

- John C. Maxwell

True economy consists in always making the income exceed the out-go. Wear the old clothes a little longer if necessary; dispense with the new pair of gloves; mend the old dress: live on plainer food if need be; so that, under all circumstances, unless some unforeseen accident occurs, there will be a margin in favor of the income.

- P.T. Barnum

The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.

- Seth Godin

Being excellent is hard. So when you have something hard to do, remember you are being excellent. Do you want to be remembered for being good or great?

- Lee Cockerell

Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.

- Richard Branson

In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.

- Napoleon Hill

[Medco] had a different culture with respect to spending money. I believe health care demands that we be as frugal as possible and pay money for things that matter. We’re pretty frugal. Everybody has the same size offices. Everybody has the same size cube. There are no perks.

- George Paz

When you set down the path to create art, whatever sort of art it is, understand that the path is neither short not easy. That means you must determine if the route is worth the effort. If it’s not, dream bigger.

- Seth Godin

Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.

- Steve Wozniak

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

- Steven Wright

When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world

- George Washington Carver

Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.

- Ben Horowitz

Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

- Steve Jobs

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

- Dale Carnegie

Early must I rise. Leave now you must!

- Yoda

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

- Warren Buffett

No matter what’s happening, choose to be happy. Don’t focus on what’s wrong. Find something positive in your life. Thank God for the small things.

- Joel Olsteen

I was fascinated with jeans, because you can impress your life upon the jeans you wear. The way you sit imprints on the jeans.

- Jack Dorsey

Vince McMahon is one of the greatest storytellers of all time, but WWE’s not striving for the kind of innovation it’s capable of.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.

- Larry Page

Well, clearly Apple is a role model of the American innovation whereby it produced all these products – iPod, iPhone, iPad – that are really now dominating all the technology arena in the world.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Americans move more than 10 times over the course of a lifetime.

- Bill Gates

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

- Winston Churchill

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

- John C. Maxwell

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

What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

- Steve Martin

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

- Jeff Bezos

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

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

I now eat four Brazil nuts and one tablespoon of almond butter first thing upon waking.

- Timothy Ferriss

You learn in this business: It you want a friend, get a dog.

- Carl Icahn

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

- Dale Carnegie

People naturally follow those stronger than themselves.

- John Maxwell

The ballplayer who loses his head can’t keep his cool, is worse than no ballplayer at all.

- Lou Gehrig

My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.

- Mark Zuckerberg

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

- Henry Ford

Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX.

- Peter Thiel

Once we finished Christmas Rappin’ we began shopping it around town. There was interest, but no one was biting. The industry’s attitude was that Rapper’s Delight despite its U.S. sales and international appeal was an unrepeatable fluke. We identified Polygram which had a great roster of funk and R&B acts (Kool and the Gang, the Gap Band, Parliament) as the best place for Kurtis, so we made up a gang of test pressings and took them to clubs all over the city. Response in the street from DJs and club goers was great. So to hype up PolyGram we placed fake orders for the record into their system by telling retailers and wholesalers to order the 12 inch through PolyGram. PolyGram didn’t own it yet, but we created an appetite for Christmas Rappin that led them to buy it…So in the fall of 1979 Kurtis Blow signed with Mercury Records a division of Polygram Records, making him the first rapper on a major label…Christmas eve 1979 was the first time that I heard Christmas Rappin’ on the radio; I was upstairs at my family’s house. Frankie Crocker the biggest radio DJ in New York played it on WBLS.

- Russell Simmons

If you want people to know how much you care, show them how much you remember. Learn their names and use them often. It’s an important skill to develop.

- Harvey Mackay

The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.

- John C. Maxwell

If you are a big company, a big website, and lots of users come to your website, you will have attacks, and you have to deal with that. It just cannot be a reason to take actions to exit certain markets.

- Robin Li

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.

- Jeff Bezos

If your feet are in two buckets and the average temperature of the water is 90 degrees, you’re probably fine—unless one bucket is at 35 and the other is at 145 degrees. On average, you’re fine. Based on variation, though, you’re miserable.

- Seth Godin

The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).

- Peter Thiel

In the early days, I really felt the pain of not being able to find information easily. I guess that helped me to develop an urge to write things like a search engine.

- Robin Li

By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.

- Bill Gates

You can build a successful career, regardless of your field of endeavor, by the dozens of little things you do on and off the job.

- Zig Ziglar

Uber is “way more” evil than Google, the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley.

- Peter Thiel

Certainly there are times in all of our lives when bad things happen, or things don’t turn out as we had hoped. But that’s when we we must a decision that we’re going to be happy inspite of our circumstances.

- Joel Olsteen

You are looking at an economy that most CEOs are going to believe will be a good economy for 2006. Most CEOs are saying they are going to spend both on hiring of people and on technology.

- John Chambers

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

- Winston Churchill

Don’t waste your energy trying to convince people to understand you. Your time is too valuable to try to prove yourself to people.

- Joel Olsteen

Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new.

- Peter Thiel

Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius.

- Peter Thiel

Good executives never put off until tomorrow what they can get someone else to do today.

- John C. Maxwell

Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one.

- Joel Olsteen

I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.

- Oprah Winfrey

Monopolists downplay their monopoly status to avoid scrutiny, while competitive firms strategically exaggerate their uniqueness.

- Peter Thiel

The student who elects to risk it all—which is nothing—to establish an online video rental service that delivers $5,000 per month in income from a small niche of Blu-ray aficionados, a two-hour-per-week side project that allows him to work full-time as an animal rights lobbyist.

- Timothy Ferriss

One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That’s why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.

- Ben Horowitz

If you want to take the island, you have to burn the boats.

- David Nilssen

The trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t kill competition. Competition is healthy for businesses. It keeps you – the entrepreneur – on your toes.

- Aliko Dangote

More people will yell and wave at you to tell you that you forgot to close the gas cap than the amount of people who will stop to tell you that you are going the wrong direction with your life.

- Clay Clark

Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today. Go another mile!

- Og Mandino

The marriage partner is not really the problem. No other person can ultimately make you happy. You must learn how to be happy within yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn’t matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you’re going to be thrown off your feet by it. So you prepare for this inevitable disorientation and steady yourself to get through it. Then you take the challenge, make the change, and achieve your dream.

- Harvey Mackay

In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done, and they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield…march straightforward.

- Winston Churchill

As soon as we associate reading with a test, we’ve missed the point.

- Seth Godin

Business in Russia was not being done like in the West, with contracts. In Russia, hundreds of millions of dollars were going forward and backward by word of mouth.

- David Reuben

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

- Winston Churchill

Just as ships are built to sail the seas and planes to fly the heavens, so is man created for a purpose.

- Zig Ziglar

Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.

- Sam Walton

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