This implies two very strange rules for VCs. First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. This is a scary rule, because it eliminates the vast majority of possible investments. (Even quite successful companies usually succeed on a more humble scale.) This leads to rule number two: because rule number one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
If it’s a good idea, someone has already probably thought about it first.
- Jack Nadel
Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen.
- Winston Churchill
just like most nightmares, it’s not that big a deal and is reversible.
- Timothy Ferriss
It is very likely that Hong Kong has reached the end of the tunnel and the bright sunshine is not far from us.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
- Mark Zuckerberg
New research shows that you will be dead longer than you will be alive.
- Zig Ziglar
Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?
- Rupert Murdoch
Ohhh. Great warrior.Wars not make one great.
- Yoda
Named must your fear be before banish it you can.
- Yoda
My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.
- Mark Zuckerberg
My principal business consists of giving commercial value to the brilliant, but misdirected, ideas of others…. Accordingly, I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.
- Thomas Edison
Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.
- John C. Maxwell
I’m a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That’s what I’ve done in my career, one that’s culminated in – at least to this point – playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That’s the Bakken field, which I believe will yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come, maybe more.
- Harold Hamm
A right delayed is a right denied.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
- Aristotle
E – Energy
- Jack Welch
Good executives never put off until tomorrow what they can get someone else to do today.
- John C. Maxwell
It’s a libel to say that I use my newspapers to support my other business interests. The fact is, I haven’t got any other business interests.
- Rupert Murdoch
I would hope that , where possible, the newspaper will devote more thought to our commercial interests. In my view, there are sometimes news items that require a lot of caution. For instance, articles that talk about contracts being negotiated. There is some news that does more harm than good. The risk is that it threatens the commercial or industrial interests of our country.
- Serge Dassault
If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.
- Peter Thiel
1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization.
- Peter Thiel
We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective.
- Peter Thiel
Motivation needs to be a part of your own life for you to be effective in conveying it to other people.
- Zig Ziglar
So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.
- Peter Drucker
Honesty and integrity are absolutely essential for success in life – all areas of life. The really good news is that anyone can develop both honesty and integrity.
- Zig Ziglar
The record results for the third quarter once again demonstrate the ability of GE’s diverse mix of leading global businesses to deliver top-line growth, increased margins and strong cash generation.
- Jack Welch
Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
- Winston Churchill
If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.
- Larry Page
I really chess-play culture shifts. I’m really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That’s what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Life is a classroom — only those who are willing to be lifelong learners will move to the head of the class.
- Zig Ziglar
It partly depends on the currency regimes in place in the country.
- John Chambers
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
- Dale Carnegie
We’re really going after truly creating sustainability of a disease-free state, creating a complete system for managing cancer patients for life, so that you can manage from onset of disease all the way through.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Start calling yourself healed, happy, whole, blessed, and prosperous. Stop talking to God about how big your mountains are, and start talking to your mountains about how big your God is!
- Joel Olsteen
When you have one million dollars, you’re a lucky person. When you have 10 million dollars, you’ve got trouble, a lot of headaches. When you have more than one billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, that’s a responsibility you have – it’s the trust of people on you, because people believe you can spend money better than the others.
- Jack Ma
You know what, Steve Jobs is real nice to me. He lets me be an employee and that’s one of the biggest honors of my life.
- Steve Wozniak
I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he’s got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.
- Bill Gates
The thing I lose patience with the most is the clock. Its hands move too fast.
- Thomas Edison
God is faithful to His word. All of His promises are Yes” and Amen.” That means if you will do your part and believe even though it looks impossible, and not let your mind, your emotions, or other people talk you out of it, then God promises in due season and at the right time He will bring it to pass. It may not happen the way you expect it or on your timetable, but God is a faithful God. It will happen.
- Joel Olsteen
Mr Churchill, to what do you attribute your success in life? Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down
- Winston Churchill
Why do I drive a truck? What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
- Sam Walton
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
- Winston Churchill
The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
- Dale Carnegie
This the real world, homie, school finished They done stole your dreams, you dunno who did it.
- Kanye West
You can’t have a mid-life crisis in the airline industry because every day is a crisis.
- Herb Kelleher
You don’t have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn’t know you possessed.
- Napoleon Hill
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
We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.
- Winston Churchill
If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.
- Andrew Carnegie
Well, you know, News Corp is the only real media global – that has a global presence that’s involved in TV production, in movies, in publishing, in newspapers, digital media, et cetera. So for a company like that to function, clearly it does not depend only on Rupert Murdoch or James Murdoch.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
I’m short on New York, long on Silicon Valley.
- Peter Thiel
China and the U.S. need each other very badly. Yes, we should argue about some things, but it’s not an ‘us versus them,’ it’s an ‘us and them’ type scenario.
- Bill Gates
I know nothing about technology.
- Jack Ma
Yes, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.
- Yoda
Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.
- John D. Rockefeller
Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those who surrendered tamely were finished.
- Winston Churchill
We will go forward… we will never go back.
- Michael Bloomberg
Humor is always a risky business.
- Phil Knight
You know, I start with the assumption that -or with, with the belief that this president has to succeed. We all have an enormous amount of capital invested in his success. His success is the country’s success.
- Michael Bloomberg
You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.
- Bill Gates
If we are growing we are always going to be outside our comfort zone.
- John C. Maxwell
The most obvious clue was sartorial: cleantech executives were running around wearing suits and ties. This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings.
- Peter Thiel
I’ve changed my will to show my concern for animal rights.
- Stephen Wynn
The only way to solve the problem of Boko Haram is to create jobs.
- Aliko Dangote
China is a government-oriented economy. No one can say he can run his business entirely without government connections. Anybody who says that he or she can do things alone… is a hypocrite.
- Wang Jianlin
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. Why are we such fools—such tragic fools?
- Dale Carnegie
Age doesn’t matter, an open mind does.
- Timothy Ferriss
Maui reminded me of San Diego: beautiful, but crowded.
- Larry Ellison
Culture manages when management is not there.
- Joe Jordan
That’s why encouragement is a much more effective teaching device than punishment.
- Dale Carnegie
I’ve run into people in my life who were so dramatic; people who are so extreme and so frustrating to be around that you end up thinking about them and talking about them for literally years after your experience with them is over. I’ve had that happen to me, and I’ve seen it happen to other people. I find it fascinating.
- Steve Martin
My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids.
- Joel Olsteen
Most of our wives are planners and meticulous budgeters. In fact, only 18 percent of us disagreed with the statement Charity begins at home. Most of us will tell you that our wives are a lot more conservative with money than we are.
- Thomas J Stanley
If all we do with these tools is teach compliance and consumption, that’s all we’re going to get. School can and must do more than train the factory workers of tomorrow.
- Seth Godin
Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.
- Warren Buffett
The U.S. couldn’t even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They’ll be killing each other again in less than a year. I’m sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.
- Bill Gates
If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.
- Winston Churchill
Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.
- Donald Trump
Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.
- Stephen R. Covey
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
- Marc Benioff
If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you’re going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there’s no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I’m fine with the consequences.
- Timothy Ferriss
There has never been a statue erected in honor of a critic.
- Zig Ziglar
And then you take a look at Spaces, there is this great innovation that came out of nowhere. We have the number one blogging site in the world because of the innovation that’s there.
- Steve Ballmer
I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‘Automobile Magazine.’ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.
- Jerry Seinfeld
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
The time will never be right to start. Today is your day. Study successful people, do what they do, and you too will be successful.
- Clay Clark
Think global, but start local.
- Jack Nadel
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
You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.
- John Maxwell
Ever since Justin Timberlake portrayed him in The Social Network, Sean has been perceived as one of the coolest people in America. JT is still more famous, but when he visits Silicon Valley, people ask if he’s Sean Parker.
- Peter Thiel
There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.
- Ben Horowitz
I think what’s happening for me, it’s fun to see other things besides Facebook and Twitter take hold. The maturity of Tumblr as a real player is exciting. I think Pinterest has proved to be a major player. It’s fun to see Instagram become a major player. It’s fun to watch things like SnapChat, and Vine, try to vie to be the next thing.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I am a self-made brat.
- Stephen Wynn
Making money from money is like aerobatics.
- Alisher Usmanov
Sometimes when you take strong stands, if you’re not called to do it, you’re dividing the audience you’re trying to reach.
- Joel Olsteen
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
At Netflix, we think you have to build a sense of responsibility where people care about the enterprise. Hard work, like long hours at the office, doesn’t matter as much to us. We care about great work.
- Reed Hastings
Music plays a very important role in my life. I’m a frustrated musician. I play the drums.
- Ronald Perelman
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years of trying to get other people interested in you.
- Dale Carnegie
