Notable Quotables

If you want to help the poor and our next generation, make investment, reinvestment and businesses welcome.

- Gina Rinehart

People are the key to success or extraordinary success.

- Azim Premji

I don’t know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.

- Reed Hastings

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 18. I started a company with a bunch of buddies that got funded in my senior year, and that’s when I finished school. It was called Scour, a peer-to-peer service, file-sharing.

- Travis Kalanick

We don’t have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.

- Larry Page

There is a hidden blessing in the most traumatic things we go through in our lives. My brain always goes to, ‘Where is the hidden blessing? What is my gift?

- Sara Blakely

Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.

- Stephen R. Covey

Any time a company grows as fast as Wal-Mart has, pockets of duplication are going to build up, and there will be areas of the business which we may no longer need. No boss or employee really likes to dwell on such matters; it’s only human nature not to want to have your job, or the jobs of the people who work for you, eliminated. But it is absolutely the responsibility of a company’s top management to be thinking about this issue all the time – to ensure the sound future for the overall company.

- Sam Walton

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

- Aristotle

Every company must deal decisively with people who don’t perform satisfactorily….Great people, not great strategies are what made it all work (GE).

- Jack Welch

In 1984, the Sino-British talks on the future of Hong Kong triggered a confidence crisis. Daunted by the uncertainties over the colony’s future, most developers shied away from construction projects that took considerable time to complete. In that year the Group recognized what the community needed and actively responded to the government’s call for a landmark convention and exhibition venue of international standard to be built in Hong Kong. The Group turned out to be the only developer willing to take financial and operating risks on a long-term basis, thereby laying a solid foundation for Hong Kong to host international conventions and exhibitions. Coupled with its excellent services, Hong Kong soon secured world-wide recognition as an ideal spot of conferences and exhibitions.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.

- Warren Buffett

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

- Bill Gates

This marks the eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year top-line growth for Cisco.

- John Chambers

I hate how many people think “glass half-empty” when their glass is really four-fifths full. I’m grateful when I have one drop in the glass because I know exactly what to do with it.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The abundance mindset makes it easier to be graceful.

- Seth Godin

When we face with a steady eye the difficulties which lie before us, we may derive new confidence from remembering those we have already overcome.

- Winston Churchill

If you are only big in China, you are only a local Chinese company.

- Wang Jianlin

Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they’ve discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.

- Seth Godin

The book ‘Do You!’ is about your inner voice. And when you connect to that voice then you – then the freedom comes. And we’re only here to be happy. So happy makes money. Money doesn’t make happy.

- Russell Simmons

Foreign politicians don’t have resources – or limited resources. It’s useless dealing with them.

- Wang Jianlin

about 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.

- Dale Carnegie

That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

- Peter Thiel

During the past financial year, development properties sold by the Group amounted to approximately HK$3,592 million in total attributable sales proceeds, representing around 1,700 units…

- Lee Shau Kee

Education isn’t a problem until it serves as a buffer rom the world and a refuge from the risk of failure.

- Seth Godin

What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues. Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.

- John Chambers

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

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

- Warren Buffett

If I were to retire, I would keep my family’s interest in the company the same and say, Don’t sell.

- Sheldon Adelson

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

Chance can allow you to accomplish a goal every once in a while, but consistent achievement happens only if you love what you are doing.

- Bart Conner

I tried to build a company my father would have been proud to work for, that he would have looked back on and said, ‘That’s the company that honoured me, even though I don’t have an education’. I wanted to build a company that had a conscience.

- Howard Schultz

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

- Dale Carnegie

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof when your own doorstep is unclean.

- Confucius

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

- Joel Olsteen

Judgment of the people in the situation is not helpful. How can you help them is the question.

- Russell Simmons

How many companies have you encountered that articulate a clear ideology at the start of the company, yet cannot articulate a clear idea of what products to make?

- James C. Collins

The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.

- Peter Thiel

It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot . .

- Zig Ziglar

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

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

- Peter Thiel

I cut the feet out of my control top pantyhose to wear under these white pants and that was the ah-ha moment that started Spanx. My own butt was my own inspiration!

- Sara Blakely

Leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.

- Peter Thiel

Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.

- Malcolm Forbes

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

- Joel Olsteen

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

- Peter Thiel

The lifeblood of job creation in America is small business, but they can’t get access to credit.

- Howard Schultz

Not only was the casual shoe effort a failure, but it was diluting our trademark and hurting us in running.

- Phil Knight

We have a big opportunity in China. We think the number of stores here can rival the number in North America.

- Howard Schultz

10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970.

- Peter Thiel

On Facebook, the definition of great content is not the content that makes the most sales, but the content that people most want to share with others.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I may be over the top on this, but I just don’t want to like my competitors. I want my people to believe that whenever he and our other competitors succeed, we will be less able to do all the things we want to do.

- Phil Knight

The connected economy of ideas demands that we contribute initiative. And yet we resist, because our lizard brain, the one that lives in fear, relentlessly exaggerates the cost of being wrong.

- Seth Godin

The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.

- Anthony Robbins

I’ve got some good days, I’ve got some bad. (But my) game has definitely improved.

- Ed Clark

I was born in a family with a strong military background, so I chose to be a soldier.

- Wang Jianlin

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

So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.

- Thomas Edison

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don’t count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

- Mukesh Ambani

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.

- Peter Drucker

All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

- Peter Thiel

In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away.

- Peter Thiel

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

It’s easy to dream about it … Much harder to execute it ….Work!

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Churchill kept perspective on the crowds that gathered to hear him speak by conceding they would be twice as big if gathered to see him hanged.

- Winston Churchill

There is tremendous stress these days on liking people, helping people, getting along with people, as qualifications for a manager. These alone are never enough. In every successful organization there is one boss who does not like people, who does not help them, and who does not get along with them. Cold, unpleasant, demanding, he often teaches and develops more men than anyone else. He commands more respect than the most likable man ever could. He demands exacting workmanship of himself as well as of his men. He sets high standards and expects that they will be lived up to. He considers only what is right and never who is right. And though often himself a man of brilliance, he never rates intellectual brilliance above integrity in others. The manager who lacks these qualities of character—no matter how likable, helpful, or amiable, no matter even how competent or brilliant—is a menace and should be adjudged “unfit to be a manager and a gentleman.

- Peter Drucker

More than trends, consumers need functionality. Everything needs an element of fashion, but that’s more like a spice.

- Tadashi Yanai

George W. Bush stated, I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation. That’s when I knew Bush was headed for trouble. With all due respect for the office, I completely disagree with him. In my view, it’s the leader’s responsibility to explain his or her actions every step of the way. And the higher up you are, the more important it is.

- David Novak

I’m concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise. My dad taught me that when you borrow money it’s the worst day of your life.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.

- Steve Martin

The word ‘Spanx’ was funny. It made people laugh. No one ever forgot it.

- Sara Blakely

Some of us learn from other people’s mistakes and the rest of us have to be other people.

- Zig Ziglar

There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.

- Dale Carnegie

The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.

- Seth Godin

Even though people are under economic pressure, they still want to support those brands with values that are compatible with their own.

- Howard Schultz

The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.

- Dale Carnegie

No effort has been spared in ensuring the best designs for all our projects.

- Lee Shau Kee

God is a good God, and He gives good things to his children. No matter who has denigrated you or how much pain you’ve experienced in life, no matter how many setbacks you have suffered, you cannot allow yourself to accept that as the way life is supposed to be. No, God has better things in store for you. You must reprogram your mind with God’s word; change that negative, defeated self-image, and start seeing yourself as winning, coming out on top. Start seeing that marriage as restored. See your business as flourishing. See your children as enjoying the good things of God. You must see it through your eyes of faith, and then it will begin to happen.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Stephen Wynn

I have found from costly experience that it is much easier to analyze the facts after writing them down. In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us reach a sensible decision. As Charles Kettering puts it: A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

- Dale Carnegie

Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.

- Sara Blakely

I’m surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms.

- Steve Wozniak

While there’s always room for improvement, … we were very pleased with our results in what is a seasonally-challenging quarter.

- John Chambers

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription