Notable Quotables

Pain, suffering, death I feel. Something terrible has happened. Young Skywalker is in pain. Terrible pain.

- Yoda

Confidence in our own independence of mind. But advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away, it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. Anyone who can’t acknowledge its likely effect on himself is doubly deceived.

- Peter Thiel

So long as I can stay mentally alert – inquiring, curious – I want to keep going. I love my wife and my children, but I don’t want to sit around at home with them. We go on safaris and things like that. I can do that for a couple of weeks a year. I’m just not ready to stop, to die.

- Rupert Murdoch

You don’t have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.

- Michael Dell

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

- Haruki Murakami

I love cities, and I love city governments in particular. But in politics it would have taken me 8 years from implementing a policy before I would get to see the feedback. With programming I could model the same policies and see the impact immediately. Technology is a far more efficient way to test.

- Jack Dorsey

When you wake up every day, you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative; an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist. It’s all a matter of perspective.

- Harvey Mackay

the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19

- James C. Collins

You know, the diversity that America has is so special. It’s starting to really become a cool thing for young people.

- Russell Simmons

The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.

- Richard Branson

It’s your ATTITUDE not your APTITUDE that ultimately determines your ALTITUDE!

- Zig Ziglar

Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls– family, health, friends, integrity– are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered

- Gary Keller

I’d never worked in fashion or retail. I just needed an undergarment that didn’t exist.

- Sara Blakely

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

- Jack Welch

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.

- James C. Collins

The annals of business are filled with stories of companies that thought they had it made and could milk their enterprises without having to bother about improving their products or services. It’s amazing how fast they found their markets disappearing.

- Harvey Mackay

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

- Walter Lippmann

Churchill used words for different purposes: to argue for moral and political causes, to advocate courses of action in the social, national and international spheres, and to tell the story of his own life and that of Britain and its place in the world.

- Winston Churchill

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

I run a bunch of charities and I say this line to people: ‘I am somebody who has always been helped.’ A little thing like that can make people believe it.

- Russell Simmons

I’m going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.

- Bill Gates

If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

- Dale Carnegie

Don’t worry that you can’t seem to come up with sure billion dollar winners at first. Just do projects for yourself for fun. You’ll get better and better.

- Steve Wozniak

Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals. Management.

- Peter Drucker

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves – their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

- Peter Drucker

Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.

- Peter Thiel

Sunseeker is well placed to take full advantage of opportunities in China, one of the world’s fastest growing luxury yacht markets.

- Wang Jianlin

We were always trying to look for people who could help us beyond what we were doing.

- Phil Knight

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 lovely nook of forest scenery, or a grand rock, like a beautiful woman, depends for much of its attractiveness upon the attendance sense of freedom from whatever is low; upon a sense of purity and of romance.

- P.T. Barnum

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

If you don’t love what you’re doing with unbridled passion and enthusiasm, you’re not going to succeed when you hit obstacles.

- Howard Schultz

Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret.

- George Soros

After you become a millionaire, you can give all of your money away because what’s important is not the million dollars; what’s important is the person you have become in the process of becoming a millionaire.

- Jim Rohn

What you get by reaching your destination is not nearly as important as what you will become by reaching your destination.

- Zig Ziglar

Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing, right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, it’s invisible.

- Seth Godin

Facing a market which awaited exploration and development, the Group decided to become a pioneer in its economic reform by taking up the responsibility to engage in the development of the Mainland.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Ask yourself, what’s the one thing that I can do right now so I’m on track to achieve my someday goals?

- Gary Keller

She came up with what is now the Swoosh for $35 which is a pretty good bargain.

- Phil Knight

The soul of business is not making money but making people happy.

- Aliko Dangote

With tech companies, whoever’s the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, ‘Is this the end of them?’ And – there’s more – more times people think that’s the case than it really is the case.

- Bill Gates

When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.

- Winston Churchill

The Hindus are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

- Joel Olsteen

The Group has not been deterred by any negative sentiment and will as ever respond to the challenges and opportunities ahead of us with the same spirit of caution, flexibility, determination and dynamism, which have brought much success to us in the past.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.

- Michael Gerber

Sometimes God will deliver you from the fire, and other times God will make you fireproof.

- Joel Olsteen

Wild Turkey whiskey and Philip Morris cigarettes are essential to the maintenance of human life!

- Herb Kelleher

Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.

- Peter Thiel

Jesus was saying that you can’t have a larger life with restricted attitudes.

- Joel Olsteen

Effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information. Little is worse than a manager who can’t cut bait.

- Jack Welch

I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.

- Seth Godin

People easily confuse skill with personality.

- Jerry Vass

They were going to get it all right the first time right… Open to change.

- Jack Dorsey

The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers

- Sam Walton

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

- Elon Musk

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win — you’re still a rat.

- Lily Tomlin

Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

- Timothy Ferriss

As a general thing, I have not ‘duped the world’ nor attempted to do so… I have generally given people the worth of their money twice told.

- P.T. Barnum

The higher the level of leadership people want to reach, the greater the sacrifices they will have to make?

- John Maxwell

The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.

- Phil Knight

No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.

- Michael Bloomberg

I think that our fundamental belief is that for us growth is a way of life and we have to grow at all times.

- Mukesh Ambani

Bell took the opposite approach, building multiple restaurants in a single neighborhood to eliminate the competition. It’s a strategy that’s widely used today by many companies like Starbuck’s, Barnes & Noble, and many others, and it worked for Bell.

- David Novak

The essential thing to know about the Dip is that it’s there. Knowing that you’re facing a Dip is the first step in getting through it.

- Seth Godin

Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We’ll break out of it. It takes time.

- Warren Buffett

If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you’ll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job.

- Seth Godin

Bill Gates was in his 20s when he started with $50,000 and became the richest man in the world with $90 billion. It’s a good idea that he did not ask too many people for their ideas on what they thought was possible for his life.

- Robert Kiyosaki

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way.

- Timothy Ferriss

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

There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.

- Bill Gates

Little phrases such as ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ ‘Would you be so kind as to –?’ ‘Won’t you please?’ ‘Would you mind?’ ‘Thank you’ – little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life – and incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

- Dale Carnegie

If change is happening on the outside faster than on the inside the end is in sight.

- Jack Welch

There will be no government that will be against business, so you can go ahead and invest.

- Aliko Dangote

The result of information overload is usually distraction, and it dilutes your focus and takes you off your game.

- Zig Ziglar

If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.

- Sam Walton

The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett-Packard after the sale of Opsware, there was an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Little companies wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me, people in my organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help, customers wanted my attention, and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.” In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to do too much. As a result, big company executives tend to be interrupt-driven. In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.

- Ben Horowitz

Diversification does not mean that we have lost confidence in the long term prospects of the property market. Just the contrary is true.One year after the hand-over of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, the people in Hong Kong and around the world have witnessed the successful implementation of the ‘One Country, Two System.’

- Cheng Yu-tung

[In January 2011] I think Twitter is so unique that we must stay independent.

- Jack Dorsey

We don’t want disruption where we just move things around from point a to point b. We want a direction, we want a purpose.

- Jack Dorsey

If the broadcasters were to win on their claims, they’d outlaw the DVR.

- Charles Ergen

You can’t have a mid-life crisis in the airline industry because every day is a crisis.

- Herb Kelleher

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. 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. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

- Ben Horowitz

I swore I would never get involved in another startup ever again in my entire life.

- Larry Ellison

Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.

- Henry Ford

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

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly–until you can learn to do it well.

- Zig Ziglar

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