Notable Quotables

business to be paid a salary of over a million dollars a year.

- Dale Carnegie

The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. ‘Impeccable credentials’ means you’ve never lived outside the United States.

- Michael Bloomberg

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.

- Elon Musk

Create a vision and personalize it. People need to say, I understand it, I’m excited about it, and I can make it happen.

- David Novak

We used to think that everything started in the lab. Now we realize that everything spins off the consumer.

- Phil Knight

EBay is a great company. There are a lot of good assets and good customers, and the U.S. people love it.

- Jack Ma

Taking complete ownership of your outcomes by holding no one but yourself responsible for them is the most powerful thing you can do to drive your success.

- Gary Keller

I hate writing about personal stuff. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.

- Elon Musk

Networking is one of the most powerful tools you can use to grow your company and reputation.

- Business Insider.com

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

- Elon Musk

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

- Bill Gates

Success is one thing — but impact is another.

- Ray Lewis

Leadership, very simply, is about two things: 1. Truth and trust. 2. Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter.

- Jack Welch

Certainly I’ll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I’ve gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

- Bill Gates

I think if you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got to dream big and then dream bigger.

- Howard Schultz

In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where he wants to go, and gets up and goes.

- John Erskine

Le Reve’ may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.

- Stephen Wynn

All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.

- Jeff Bezos

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

- George Soros

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

- David Ogilvy

In his rigidgly compartmentalized life, each hour was tightly budgeted, whether for business, religion, family or exercise. Perhaps those daily rituals helped him deal with the underlying tensions that might otherwise have become ungovernable, for although he tried to project to an air of unhurried calm, he was under terrific strain the surface, was constantly on edge. In one of his few admissions of weakness he recalled, for years on end I never had a solid night’s sleep, worrying about how it was to come out…I tossed about in bed night after night worrying over the outcome…All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate for the anxiety of that period.

- Ron Chernow

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

- Bill Gates

I do think – as self-serving as it sounds – that I was the right person, given the very, very strong headwind we had from the economy and our own issues, to come back and rewrite the future of the company.

- Howard Schultz

I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I’d imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.

- Ray Kroc

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

- Jack Welch

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

- Jeff Bezos

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

Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad.

- Donald Trump

Remember, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Luke… Luke… do not… do not underestimate the powers of the Emperor or suffer your father’s fate you will. Luke, when gone am I… the last of the Jedi will you be. Luke, the Force runs strong in your family. Pass on what you have learned, Luke. There is… another… Sky… walker.

- Yoda

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.

- Elon Musk

The Minden prospect originated this past summer through a large acreage acquisition from a major oil company and Cabot now controls 3,500 acres over the area. We are pleased with our initial results and will remain active in this area throughout 2006. On forty-acre spacing, the prospect has the potential for 80 plus locations.

- Dan Dinges

The single reason for a salesperson’s existence is to get the Buyer’s commitment. Just how poor are salespeople at their jobs? In a study of professional sales people (those who sell full time), 50% failed to ask for the buyer’s commitment to buy.

- Jerry Vass

Obviously Tesla is about helping solve the consumption of energy in a sustainable manner, but you need the production of energy in a sustainable manner.

- Elon Musk

Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best.

- Napoleon Hill

I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all living.

- Richard Branson

In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come.

- Peter Thiel

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

We also now believe that this slowdown in capital spending could extend beyond two quarters.

- John Chambers

Some people keep God in a Sunday morning box and say, ‘Hey, I did my religious duty.’ That’s fine, but the scripture says to pray without ceasing. And I think that means all through the day you’re talking to God. Even if it’s in your thoughts.

- Joel Olsteen

Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.

- Og Mandino

Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we’re going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.

- Elon Musk

It is equally important that diversification is an ongoing process.

- Cheng Yu-tung

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

Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.

- Warren Buffett

I demand pretty aggressive goal setting and a commitment to measured progress towards those goals because I don’t like surprises. I don’t even like good surprises.

- Abigail Johnson

Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

- John D. Rockefeller

Maybe you’ve invested a lot of time, effort, money, emotion, and energy in a relationship; you did your best to make it work out. But for some reason, things got off course. And now you feel as though you have been robbed. When we focus on or disappointments, we stop God from ringing fresh new blessing into our lives.

- Joel Olsteen

Sometimes we look at gay being a bigger sin than being proud or not telling the truth. I don’t think God categorizes sins.

- Joel Olsteen

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

- Elon Musk

It’s almost always harder to raise capital than you thought it would be, and it always takes longer. So plan for that.

- Richard Harroch

When we launched the WineLibrary website in 1996, I didn’t even own a computer yet. I just understood that there was an opportunity here to market in a different way.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

You can dramatize your ideas in business or in any other aspect of your life. It’s easy.

- Dale Carnegie

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

Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

They don’t understand that Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.

- Seth Godin

Never be bothered by what people say, as long as you know in your heart you are right.

- Dale Carnegie

If someone’s criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”

- Timothy Ferriss

If you cannot save money, then the seeds of greatness are not in you.

- Brian Tracy

The [Henderson] Group adopted a conservative approach in replenishing its land bank and focused its resources to convert agricultural land holdings in hand into development land in the past year with a view to bringing down the cost of land replenishment and good progress has been made in this respect.

- Lee Shau Kee

I never took classic business classes in college, so I don’t have the background that any of the people running large companies have.

- Howard Schultz

I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.

- Dale Carnegie

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they’ve never failed to imitate them.

- Zig Ziglar

I studied the lives of great men and famous women, and I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.

- Harry Truman

Well I think a lot of times we’re putting things off and I’m going to do it later. I’m going to break this bad habit or I’m going to pursue this dream or I’m going to treat my spouse better.

- Joel Olsteen

Give your subconscious a chance to work by turning your brain off from time to time. Don’t focus on work or solving problems constantly.

- Harvey Mackay

A waitress goes up to Winston Churchill and says, ‘Sir, your drunk.’ To which he replies, ‘I may be drunk, miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.

- Winston Churchill

The craftsman and the artist say, “Here, I made this.” The workingman is asked to follow instructions.

- Seth Godin

Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining – it bores everybody else, does you no good, and doesn’t solve any problems.

- Zig Ziglar

De-escalating the rivalry post-merger wasn’t easy, but as far as problems go, it was a good one to have.

- Peter Thiel

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

- Bill Gates

Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.

- John C. Maxwell

I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

- Timothy Ferriss

When we had seventy-five stores in Arkansas, seventy-five in Missouri, eighty in Oklahoma, whatever, people knew who we were, and everybody except the merchants who weren’t discounting looked forward to our coming to their town.

- Sam Walton

The battle is all over except the ‘shouting’ when one knows what is wanted and has made up his mind to get it, whatever the price may be.

- Napoleon Hill

As much as you need a strong personality to build a business from scratch, you also must understand the art of delegation. I have to be good at helping people run the individual businesses, and I have to be willing to step back. The company must be set up so it can continue without me.

- Richard Branson

When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.

- Larry Ellison

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

- Napoleon Hill

We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we’re going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water.

- Larry Ellison

If I had to single out one element in my life that has made difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.

- Sam Walton

If you do not believe in your product or service enough to offer it to your own family and friends, then you should question the value of what you are selling.

- Zig Ziglar

You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.

- John Maxwell

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 ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.

- Donald Trump

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, and do more and become more, you are a leader.

- John Quincy Adams

The most common cause of fear of old age is associated with the possibility of poverty.

- Napoleon Hill

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