Notable Quotables

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

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships. The quality of your business is no different.

- Harvey Mackay

Uber is efficiency with elegance on top. That’s why I buy an iPhone instead of an average cell phone, why I go to a nice restaurant and pay a little bit more. It’s for the experience.

- Travis Kalanick

People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it’s growing fast.

- Peter Thiel

I feel that people I trusted – I don’t know who, on what level – have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it’s for them to pay. And I think, frankly, that I’m the best person to see it through.

- Rupert Murdoch

The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

- Dale Carnegie

We have more than six and one-half times the level of wealth of our non-millionaire neighbors, but, in our neighborhood, these nonmillionaires outnumber us better than three to one. Could it be that they have chosen to trade wealth for acquiring high-status material possessions?

- Thomas J Stanley

Steve Jobs’ ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.

- Bill Gates

Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.

- Bill Gates

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‘I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.’ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

- Joel Olsteen

I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.

- Elon Musk

He felt the Gettysburg Address was one of the greatest documents ever written, mainly because Lincoln had said so much with so few words.

- David Novak

Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t be intimidated as you design your pitch. The fact is that nobody will come to you at first. You must be the aggressor, or you will not be heard.

- Michael Levine

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Pick people who are interested in what you’re interested in.

- Russell Simmons

When my partners and I meet with entrepreneurs, the two key characteristics that we look for are brilliance and courage. In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

- Ben Horowitz

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

To create a big company, you need more partners, as it is hard to handle such a project alone. Such projects bring access to the expertise and management resources of the partners, and their connections above all.

- Vladimir Potanin

We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.

- Thomas Edison

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

- Henry Ford

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

- Bill Gates

A movement is thrilling. It’s the work of many people, all connected, all seeking something better.

- 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

Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.

- Larry Ellison

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

- Bill Gates

In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do do comedy during that show. It’d be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.

- Steve Martin

The new information technology… Internet and e-mail… have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

- Peter Drucker

I’m going to retain a lot of Microsoft’s stock.

- Bill Gates

Do not listen to those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious.

- Og Mandino

The polar opposite business cliché warns that “the best product doesn’t always win.

- Peter Thiel

Time has its role to play in one’s behaviour and how one conducts himself in society. With the passage of time, we master our lives better and become more refined and polished, step by step.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

- Elon Musk

I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.

- Steve Ballmer

An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions. People are quite flexible, in that they can be trained to succeed at quite different things. An employee of IBM, for example, can quite readily change the way he or she works, in order to work successfully in a small start-up company. But processes and values are not flexible. A process that is effective at managing the design of a minicomputer, for example, would be ineffective at managing the design of a desktop personal computer. Similarly, values that cause employees to prioritize projects to develop high-margin products, cannot simultaneously accord priority to low-margin products. The very processes and values that constitute an organization’s capabilities in one context, define its disabilities in another context.

- Clayton M. Christensen

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

- John Buchan

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.

- Herb Kelleher

Do it, and then you will feel motivated to do it.

- Zig Ziglar

For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

- Bill Gates

Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.

- Oprah Winfrey

Until you are happy with who you are, you will never be happy because of what you have.

- Zig Ziglar

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

- George Soros

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

- Jerry Seinfeld

In life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.

- Ben Horowitz

In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.

- Peter Thiel

You may be at a crossroads in your life. You may have issues to deal with; people you need to forgive. You can go one of the two ways. You can ignore what you now know to be true and keep burying that bitterness in your life, pushing it deeper and allowing it to poison and contaminate you and those around you. Or you can make a much better choice by getting it out in the open and asking God to help you to totally forgive and let it all go.

- Joel Olsteen

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

- John Wooden

If it’s a good idea, someone has already probably thought about it first.

- Jack Nadel

The buyer needs to talk at least 70% of the time.

- Clay Clark

Over the past ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.

- Ben Horowitz

One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.

- Ben Horowitz

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

- Napoleon Hill

Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.

- Timothy Ferriss

We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.

- Seth Godin

Owners don’t fire all the players. They fire the leader and bring in someone they hope the players will buy into.

- Napoleon Hill

We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important.

- Sergey Brin

I’m a physician. I’ve been blessed with ideas and resources to use technology to make the world a better place. That’s what I would like to leave behind.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

Although office rental in Hong Kong recorded a general downward adjustment and the slowdown in the economy in the past financial year brought along its negative impacts on the local retailing and food sectors, the major retail shopping properties owned by the Group were able to maintain an overall occupancy rate of 93% whilst rental levels generally remained steady.

- Lee Shau Kee

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

- Jerry Seinfeld

In Russia, or anywhere, people don’t like rich people. Yeah, OK, I have money, but the question is how I use it. It’s not easy, believe me; it’s not easy.

- Viktor Vekselberg

Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.

- Harvey Mackay

I have a list of the hardest, most challenging problems that our company needs to solve and I start at the top and work my way down. And I have a list of the coolest most fascinating things that we can invent and I start at the top of the list and I work my way down.

- Travis Kalanick

Hold on to that new, enlarge vision of victory that God has given you. Start expecting things to change in your favor. Dare to boldly declare that you are standing strong against the forces of darkness.

- Joel Olsteen

In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching.

- Bill Gates

Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.

- Bill Gates

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

- Rupert Murdoch

I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.

- Richard Branson

God, I’m ready. I’m taking the limits off of You. I’m enlarging my vision. I may not see a way but I know You have a way. I declare I’m coming into a shift.

- Joel Olsteen

When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness. Our enemies would dance with joy if only they knew how they were worrying us, lacerating us, and getting even with us! Our hate is not hurting them at all, but our hate is turning our own days and nights into a hellish turmoil.

- Dale Carnegie

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

- Warren Buffett

This first time through has been hectic, but I expect it to be more stream-lined next year.

- Jack Taylor

Starting means you’re going to finish. If it doesn’t ship, you’ve failed. You haven’t poked the box if the box doesn’t realize it’s been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it’s merely a hobby.

- Seth Godin

I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft.

- Steve Ballmer

Every great business is built on friendship.

- JC Penney

Always remember, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

- Winston Churchill

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That’s a bittersweet ending.

- Timothy Ferriss

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas, but the image is that they all come from the top. I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

- Bill Gates

Sustaining faith is what sets you through those dark nights of the soul when you don’t know where to go or what to do, and it seems that you can’t last another day…but because of your faith in God, you do.

- Joel Olsteen

Execution begins with a vision and your people saying, I understand it. I’m excited about it. I can help make it happen.

- David Novak

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

Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP.

- Peter Thiel

[On Howard White] Rather than say to young people that they should have a goal and focus on it, he reverses it: ‘Any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going.’ Most often, on reflection, you will grow to understand that what had passed for a funny commnet of the moment has a good deal of wisdom behind it.

- Phil Knight

The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. There is an important.

- James C. Collins

In many places where coffee is grown, deforestation is a major issue. With Starbucks’ position in the marketplace and the respect and relationships we have, we can – and have, in some cases – been able to educate and influence people.

- Howard Schultz

Developing a customer who loves the business so much that they become an unpaid and passionate marketer for the company.

- Clay Clark

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