The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Notable Quotables
I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.
- 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
I saw a report yesterday. There’s so much oil, all over the world, they don’t know where to dump it. And Saudi Arabia says, ‘Oh, there’s too much oil.’ They – they came back yesterday. Did you see the report? They want to reduce oil production. Do you think they’re our friends? They’re not our friends.
- Donald Trump
If you want to reach the top, don’t run over others. Likely, the only way you’ll reach the top is to be carried there by others.
- John C. Maxwell
Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.
- Howard Schultz
The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima – so it’s more visible.
- Bill Gates
Maturity is often more absurd than youth and very frequently is most unjust to youth.
- Thomas Edison
Change is the price of progress.
- Napoleon Hill
Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.
- Bill Gates
To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership—not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere.
- Ronald Reagan
We have two turbines in our company: One is engineering, and the other is operations. And so our business people are on equal footing with our engineering and technology culture. Cars are moving because of what we do, so there’s an imperative to go beyond just the technology.
- Travis Kalanick
Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.
- Napoleon Hill
Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.
- Peter Drucker
As a freshman, I had to make one hell of an adjustment. I had to go from being a good high school competitor to a locker room with three Olympians in Dellinger, Bailey, and Grelle. Four, if you count Burley coming in my senior year. If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman.
- Phil Knight
Marketing is the name we use to describe the promise a company makes, the story it tells, the authentic way it delivers on that promise.
- Seth Godin
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation.
- Soren Kierkegaard
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
Great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.
- Seth Godin
The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.
- Bill Gates
Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you’re good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.
- Bill Gates
I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product.
- Ben Horowitz
No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it’s Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
The ‘morality of compromise’ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.
- Andrew Carnegie
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
There comes a precious moment in all of our lives when we are tapped on the shoulder and offered the opportunity to do something very special that is unique to us and our abilities, what a tragedy it would be if we are not ready or willing.
- Winston Churchill
The seed of a bamboo tree is planted, fertilized and watered. Nothing happens for the first year. There´s no sign of growth. Not even a hint. The same thing happens – or doesn´t happen – the second year. And then the third year. The tree is carefully watered and fertilized each year, but nothing shows. No growth. No anything. For eight years it can continue. Eight years! Then – after the eight years of fertilizing and watering have passed, with nothing to show for it – the bamboo tree suddently sprouts and grows thirty feet in three months!
- Zig Ziglar
Maintain ‘baseball cards’ and/or ‘believability matrixes’ for your people. Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.
- Ray Dalio
No alibi will save you from accepting the responsibility.
- Napoleon Hill
In the early days, anybody with a glue pot and a pair of scissors could get into the shoe business…
- Phil Knight
Be kind.
- Jack Dorsey
In between personal sales (salespeople obviously required) and traditional advertising (no salespeople required) there is a dead zone.
- Peter Thiel
The sad truth is, if you push hard enough, and if you’re so stubborn that you must have things your way, God will sometimes allow you to undertake a project without His blessing or at the wrong time. The problem with that, of course, is when you start something in your own strength and in your own timing, you’re going to have to finish it and maintain it in your own strength.
- Joel Olsteen
Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.
- Dale Carnegie
Losing an A is a sin. Love ‘em, hug ‘em, kiss ‘em, don’t lose them! We conduct postmortems on every A we lose and hold management accountable for losses.
- Jack Welch
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
God didn’t create you to be average. You were created to excel You have everything.
- Joel Olsteen
There is a certain amount of dissatisfaction that goes with knowing your time, talent and abilities are not being properly used.
- Zig Ziglar
The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers Their name alone can practically guarantee hit records.
- Richard Branson
Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.
- Reed Hastings
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
- Alexander Graham Bell
You may think you’ve got a long way to go, but you need to look back at how far you’ve already come. You may not be everything you want to be but atleast you can thank God that you’re not what you used to be.
- Joel Olsteen
Victorious leaders, share an inability to accept defeat.
- Napoleon Hill
We all need a check up from the neck up to avoid stinkin’ thinkin’ which ultimately leads to hardening of the attitude.
- Zig Ziglar
Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
- Dale Carnegie
Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.
- Winston Churchill
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
- Winston Churchill
I’m a big believer than a great bit is a great bit – if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein. I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they’re beautiful things when they’re done.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
- Timothy Ferriss
I was born in a family with a strong military background, so I chose to be a soldier.
- Wang Jianlin
But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
One reason to buy a watch (or a book) is because you want to possess it, show it off, give it to your grandchildren. Holding a book is a luxury, one for which you pay a premium.
- Seth Godin
If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.
- Rupert Murdoch
A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.
- Richard Branson
Keep thy heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life’ (Prov. 4:23 KJV).
- Joel Olsteen
Remain close to government and away from politics. It means deal more with the authorities. And less with individuals.
- Wang Jianlin
The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.
- Mark Zuckerberg
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
Hong Kong still offers the best value.
- Lee Shau Kee
You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth.
- Winston Churchill
I don’t know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.
- Reed Hastings
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
- Peter Drucker
Google’s motto—“Don’t be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it’s also characteristic of a kind of business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence.
- Peter Thiel
Ideas are commodity. Execution of them is not.
- Michael Dell
A small lie needs a bodyguard of bigger lies to protect it.
- Winston Churchill
The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.
- James C. Collins
The pancreas is by far the most complex organ in the body.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
And we know that in ALL things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
- Romans 8:28
There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth. Not going all the way, and not starting.
- Siddhartha Gautama
At the age of 30, one can overcome difficulties. By the age of 40, one has thorough appreciation of and insights into the world and becomes firmly self-assured without being carried away by all those irregularities in life.
- Cheng Yu-tung
When I was a kid a long time ago, when the sun rose, I was outside on my bike. If my parents were lucky – poor parents! – I would be home before it got dark.
- Larry Ellison
I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic … It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine’s works in my boyhood … it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker’s views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine’s writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, ‘What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!’ My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.
- Thomas Edison
There is no such thing in the world as luck. There never was a man who could go out in the morning and find a purse full of gold in the street to-day, and another to-morrow, and so on, day after day: He may do so once in his life; but so far as mere luck is concerned, he is as liable to lose it as to find it.
- P.T. Barnum
I’m less interested in how people are following each other and more interested in how they are following topics and tweets themselves. People are following more key words and concepts and more ideas and acting on those rather than individuals or organizations.
- Jack Dorsey
A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.
- Peter Thiel
The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.
- Bill Gates
Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production, using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.
- Timothy Ferriss
Nature is truly wonderful. Only man is truly foul.
- Thomas Edison
Speak the truth. Transparency breeds legitimacy.
- John C. Maxwell
The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks.
- Rupert Murdoch
Be ready for problems–you’ll have them every day. Keep open to new ideas–that’s where innovation begins.
- Donald Trump
[In January 2011] I think the important thing for Twitter is that it works on any technology.
- Jack Dorsey
The bottom line is that you need to do follow-up or you will be mediocre.
- Chet Holmes
The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
I wanted to be a sailor, I wanted to sail the world, to navigate it.
- Jack Dorsey
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
- Richard Branson
A disagreement or incident involving someone who’s not that important to you, like a guy who cut you off in traffic or a rude cashier, is something that should roll off your shoulders. Save the effort for resolving conflicts with the people you cherish.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
- Winston Churchill
Just like Mark Snider told the Board of Elections within a couple hours of when he first became aware of it… first of all, Mike and I didn’t even know anything about this till March 16, … Second of all, nobody benefited from this in any way, shape or form whatsoever.
- Michael Ward
For a successful entrepreneur it can mean extreme wealth. But with extreme wealth comes extreme responsibility. And the responsibility for me is to invest in creating new businesses, create jobs, employ people, and to put money aside to tackle issues where we can make a difference.
- Richard Branson
Practice what you preach
- Tony Hsieh
Any colour – so long as it’s black.
- Henry Ford
A lot of people feel very good about Mitt Romney and I think he’s going to do a great job.
- Donald Trump
Southwest consistently turns a profit because they have an employee ownership program that gives their employees a sense of ownership that is very real. When the company does well financially, the employees do well financially. When the company struggles, the employees struggle.
- Clay Clark
Life’s too short to spend it trying to keep others happy. You can’t please everyone. To fulfill your destiny, stay true to your heart.
- Joel Olsteen
My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.
- Peter Drucker
A riot is the language of the unheard.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
- Winston Churchill
