Notable Quotables

The people of Southwest have always been my pride, my joy and my love. Their indomitable dedication and esprit de corps have taken Southwest from a three-airplane dream to a 500-airplane reality.

- Herb Kelleher

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

Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.

- Peter Thiel

We have little choice but to move beyond quality and seek remarkable, connected, and new. Remarkable, as you’ve already figured out, demands initiative.

- Seth Godin

Whether you’re talking about the core consumer or the person on the street, the principle is the same: you have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.

- Phil Knight

I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention…. Its their ‘ideas’ that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor….’

- Thomas Edison

The definition of commerce is the activity between buyers and sellers.

- Jack Dorsey

I DECLARE I will experience God’s faithfulness. I will not worry. I will not doubt. I will keep my trust in Him, knowing that He will not fail me. I will give birth to every promise God put in my heart and I will become everything God created me to be. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

Money is not the motivating force. It’s nice to have money, but I don’t live high. What I enjoy is running the business.

- Rupert Murdoch

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

Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.

- William Feather

There are only two kinds of employees that I’ve run across in 30 years. There are ones that get results, and ones that make excuses. If you’re in that second camp, you’re not going to like Dish.

- Charles Ergen

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

- Og Mandino

Maybe you once were excited about that person God supernaturally brought into your life as a marriage partner, but now all the excitement has worn off. Don’t’ allow that sense of a miracle to slip away. Don’t get so familiar with each other that you take one another for granted.

- Joel Olsteen

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.

- Peter Drucker

the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability,” said John D., than for any other under the sun.

- Dale Carnegie

Dr. Franklin says “it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.

- P.T. Barnum

Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.

- Peter Thiel

Sometimes you may have to trade places with someone who is hurting.

- Joel Olsteen

No business can stay in business without customers. How you treat – or mistreat – them determines how long your doors stay open.

- Harvey Mackay

Since Henry Ford. It is changing the way every idea is handled, every product is created, every person interacts. It’s not going to be willing to make a detour around your gig, it’s not going to be interested in giving you a permanent sinecure. No, the revolution doesn’t care.

- Seth Godin

A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.

- Ben Horowitz

Well, you know, I was a human being before I became a businessman.

- George Soros

It’s our obligation to use the law to the furthest possible means to protect our users’ privacy. It’s just a legal and ethical principle.

- Sergey Brin

I don’t feel under-taxed in any way at all.

- Jack Welch

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

Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad).

- Peter Thiel

Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It’s something you have to learn. It’s a very lonely job.

- Ben Horowitz

A half-billion-dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid-2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was possible, and Tesla played it perfectly.

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A full and fair discussion is essential to democracy.

- George Soros

I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Tip 29 – A good Accountant is not just a scorekeeper.

- Jack Nadel

Japanese businesspeople and companies are lacking in individuality.

- Tadashi Yanai

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.

- Dale Carnegie

Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

- Bill Gates

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

- Bill Gates

Motivation is the fuel, necessary to keep the human engine running.

- Zig Ziglar

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

- Donald Trump

In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.

- Clayton M. Christensen

So if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested.

- Dale Carnegie

Marketing is every bit of contact your company has with anyone in the outside world. Every bit of contact. That means a lot of marketing opportunities. It does not mean investing a lot of money.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

McDonald’s is a people business, and that smile on that counter girl’s face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image.

- Ray Kroc

When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It’s them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.

- Jack Dorsey

At the end of the day, I guess my feeling is that it was sort of a failure to communicate.

- Phil Knight

The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.

- Peter Thiel

If you cannot persuade people to do things, you simply will not be a success because you are not an island unto yourself. Everything in life is about persuading people to do what you want them to do.

- David Robinson

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.

- Jeff Bezos

No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks, or nonmusic radio. Music is permitted at all times. No news websites whatsoever (cnn.com, drudgereport.com, msn.com,10 etc.). No television at all, except for one hour of pleasure viewing each evening. No reading books, except for this book and one hour of fiction11 pleasure reading prior to bed. No web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day. Necessary means necessary, not nice to have.

- Timothy Ferriss

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications, teamwork, self-development, and development of others.

- Peter Drucker

[On working at Nike for 48 years] In those 48 years, I have never had a promotion. but it had its other benefits.

- Phil Knight

Just saying you are better than good won’t make it so. But, when you understand what it takes to live the better than good life, and you apply yourself, your life will truly be better than good.

- Zig Ziglar

I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.

- Steve Martin

If you really believe that you’re making a difference and that you can leave a legacy of better schools and jobs and safer streets, why would you not spend the money? The objective is to improve the schools, bring down crime, build affordable housing, clean the streets – not to have a fair fight.

- Michael Bloomberg

Poor people ride the bus, because they value money more than time.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Nobody ever accused me of wisdom of any kind, let alone conventional.

- Phil Knight

The interesting products out on the Internet today are not building new technologies. They’re combining technologies. Instagram, for instance: Photos plus geolocation plus filters. Foursquare: restaurant reviews plus check-ins plus geo.

- Jack Dorsey

MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.

- Reid Hoffman

Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.

- Seth Godin

It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.

- Reed Hastings

Selling is problem solving, not hustling. Aggressiveness propels you into the mean streets, but ruin sales.

- Jerry Vass

I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business, I have always been pretty driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where we’ve been. On the one hand, in the community, I really am an establishment kind of guy; on the other hand, in the marketplace, I have always been a maverick who enjoys shaking things up and creating a little anarchy. And sometimes the establishments made me mad…

- Sam Walton

Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.

- Dale Carnegie

Most people who fail in their dream fail not from lack of ability but from lack of commitment.

- Zig Ziglar

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

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

We subpoenaed him for the SAP trial and he was on the lam. The HP board sent him to Bolivia to talk to customers. Then they sent him to Mongolia to talk to customers, just out of reach of the federal subpoenas … the board figured out [later]: we should have left Leo in Mongolia.

- Larry Ellison

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth. Not going all the way, and not starting.

- Siddhartha Gautama

Certainly there’s a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

- Bill Gates

I’m not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody’s throat: ‘You’re going to do it my way.’ I’d rather show by example and live my life and have people say, ‘You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He’s got peace and joy, and he seems content.’

- Joel Olsteen

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

- Yoda

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

I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation…I would tell you that every single person you will ever meet shares that common desire.

- Oprah Winfrey

One who works the same reactive 40 hours per week and takes the same amount of sick days and holidays off as his or her employees, yet expects to make significantly more than everyone else simply because they have the title of owner and are thus making the loan payments and the lease payments.

- Clay Clark

We live in a culture that relishes tearing others down. It’s ultimately more fulfilling, though, to help people reach their goals. Instead of feeling jealous, remember: If God did it for them, He can do it for you.

- Joel Olsteen

Once the habit is ingrained and you become the starter, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to notice, to instigate, and to initiate. Momentum builds and you get better at generating it. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to initiate things all day the next day, you’ll wake up with a list. And as you create a culture of people who are always seeking to connect and improve and poke, the bar gets raised. What might be considered a board-level decision at one of your competitors’ companies gets done as a matter of course. What might be reserved for a manager’s intervention gets handled at the customer level, saving you time and money (and generating customer joy). This incredibly prosaic idea, the very simple act of initiating, is actually profoundly transformative. Forward motion is a defensible business asset.

- Seth Godin

Never fear to negotiate, but never negotiate out of fear.

- Jack Nadel

As Americans we do not recognize the jurisdiction of the Hague Tribunal. We only follow court orders from the Chinese judiciary

- Sergey Brin

Going from PayPal, I thought: ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?’ Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money?

- Elon Musk

So the challenge, as you contemplate your next opportunity to be boring or remarkable, is to answer these two questions: (1) “If I get criticized for this, will I suffer any measurable impact? Will I lose my job, get hit upside the head with a softball bat, or lose important friendships?” If the only side effect of the criticism is that you will feel bad about the criticism, then you have to compare that bad feeling with the benefits you’ll get from actually doing something worth doing. Being remarkable is exciting, fun, profitable, and great for your career. Feeling bad wears off. And then, once you’ve compared the bad feeling and the benefits, and you’ve sold yourself on taking the remarkable path, answer this one: (2) How can I create something that critics will criticize?

- Seth Godin

Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

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