Notable Quotables

I don’t want anybody to not recognize how appreciative I am of the volume of e-mails I get.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them. Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams. So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them. Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury.

- Dale Carnegie

Although we can’t predict the future, our orders for the first weeks of this quarter are in line with the expectations we discussed in our fourth quarter earnings call.

- John Chambers

I think the acquisition of consumers might be on the verge of being mapped. The battlefield is going to be retention and lifetime value.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.

- Elon Musk

The internet had yet to take off, partly because its commercial use was restricted until late 1992 and partly due to the lack of user-friendly web browsers.

- Peter Thiel

Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass…if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass…slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own…structure.

- Dale Carnegie

The danger of the Web is that you can go from idea to public announcement in under ten minutes.

- Seth Godin

Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.

- Zig Ziglar

But the three rules I always stuck with were 1) Be on time 2) No profanity and 3) Never criticize a teammate.

- David Novak

The concept of serviced apartments makes economic sense for tenancies of short to medium term duration – a fact many leading Hong Kong and overseas corporations now appreciate.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.

- Thomas Edison

Going from PayPal, I thought: ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?’ Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money?

- Elon Musk

Don’t marry too early in life. It’s better to work hard when young and establish a career first.

- Lee Shau Kee

When it comes to Starbucks, I take every threat very personally.

- Howard Schultz

Regardless of what position people originally took, once the decision is made, everyone supports it. That’s why it is critical that no one hold anything back during the discussion.

- Patrick M. Lencioni

We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.

- Larry Page

When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.

- Michael Otto

Linchpins are the essential building blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.

- Seth Godin

This presents more of a challenge, given our current size and market leadership.

- John Chambers

We take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work.

- Ben Horowitz

The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: ‘Does your teacher use class time well?’ and, ‘When you’re confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?

- Bill Gates

As Americans we do not recognize the jurisdiction of the Hague Tribunal. We only follow court orders from the Chinese judiciary

- Sergey Brin

It had been a ‘grow, grow, grow’ era, and some people, especially young people who’d never been through a downturn before, didn’t like being told to suddenly get very conservative. But I insisted we were facing a very risky environment

- Debra Cafaro

You can’t get too much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good.

- Jerry West

Constantly probe the people who report to you, and encourage them to probe you.

- Ray Dalio

Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation and I will be ruthless.

- Warren Buffett

Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others…He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds – or on persons devoted to them – have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a ‘dirty little atheist’ he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with ‘The Rights of Man’ he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But ‘The Age of Reason’ cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen – a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad.The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty – who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause – can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.

- Thomas Edison

Do not look like you are playing the fiddle while Rome is burning….stay focussed – Paraphrased from

- David Novak

Indeed, the real question is not, Why greatness?” but What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.

- James C. Collins

The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.

- Yoda

swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table.

- Dale Carnegie

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

- Russell Simmons

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

- Warren Buffett

Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn’t an artist, he was a plumber.

- Seth Godin

In some ways, running a successful business is a bit like coaching a football team. The fundamentals of football are blocking and tackling. The fundamentals of a business are it’s governing policies andprocesses. To carry out the metaphor, touchdowns are profits. The best business idea in the world cannot survive bad execution. So when you sit down to develop your workflow, internal policies, and business structure, be merciless, probe for weaknesses and assume that the worst will happen. – Jack Nadel (Author&Entrepreneur)

- Jack Nadel

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

The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. What matters is the leader’s mission.

- Peter Drucker

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

- Henry Ford

Look at all the billionaires. If I know 15 billionaires, I know 13 unhappy people.

- Russell Simmons

Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.

- Peter Thiel

I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.

- Elon Musk

When we think about online learning, it’s such ‘early days.’ Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, ‘Who’s every going to need more than 640K of memory?’

- Reed Hastings

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I’m skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education…. People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it’s very unclear how viable they are in many cases.

- Peter Thiel

Marketing is every bit of contact your company has with anyone in the outside world. Every bit of contact. That means a lot of marketing opportunities. It does not mean investing a lot of money.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy.

- John Chambers

Hay dos errores que podemos cometer en el camino hacia la verdad. No recorrer todo el camino, y no empezar.

- Siddhartha Gautama

When you throw dirt at people, you’re not doing a thing but losing ground.

- Zig Ziglar

Already know you that which you need.

- Yoda

Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

- Bill Gates

But I believe in fair trade, and I will tell you, I have many, many friends heading up corporations, and people that do just business in China, they say it’s virtually impossible. It’s very, very hard to come into China. And yet, we welcome them with open arms.

- Donald Trump

My ultimate dream is for the Irvine Ranch to be known and celebrated as much for the outstanding communities we’ve planned and built as it is for what is not developed. The beneficiary being the 50,000 acres of undeveloped land that is now permanently preserved and conserved as Open Space and parklands.

- Donald Bren

There is a good chance India may become our largest total sales market in the whole of Asia.

- John Chambers

The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.

- Jeff Bezos

The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)

- James C. Collins

You may live or work around a bunch of weeds, but don’t let that stop you from blooming. Realize that your environment does not prevent you from being happy. Some people spend all their time trying to pull up all the weeds. Meanwhile, they miss much of their lives. Don’t worry about things you can’t change. You can’t change the traffic in the morning. You can’t fix everybody at work. You can’t make all your family members serve God. But you shouldn’t let that keep you from being happy. Bloom anyway and focus on the things that you can change. You can change your own attitude. You can choose to be happy right where you are.

- Joel Olsteen

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The clothes you wear influence you; thereby they form a part of your environment. Soiled or shabby clothes depress you and lower your self-confidence, while clean, modest and refined clothes give you a sort of inner feeling of courage that causes you to quicken your step as you walk

- Napoleon Hill

Improvement is to invent something completely new.

- Peter Thiel

It doesn’t hurt to ask Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right.

- Seth Godin

You’re never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

- Bill Gates

Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money; it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows? Maybe just like that little baby, putting your arm around somebody and letting him or her know that you care can help begin to heal that person’s heart. Maybe you can give a rescuing hug.

- Joel Olsteen

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.

- Mark Twain

Time well spent results in more money to spend, more money to save, and more time to vacation.

- Zig Ziglar

We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.

- Winston Churchill

Ideas are cheap. The difficult part is finding the team to execute them.

- Raymond Kwok

As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot.

- Ray Kroc

1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).

- Timothy Ferriss

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.

- Dale Carnegie

Live creatively, friends. . . . Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. Don’t be impressed with yourself. Don’t compare yourself with others” (Galatians 6:1, 4).

- Zig Ziglar

Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of his followers.

- Napoleon Hill

I had a will to win that come from being raised poor.

- Sam Huff

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

- Wang Jianlin

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

- Aristotle

Cisco will be well placed to continue building our presence in India as a critical part of our research and development efforts and as domestic market for networking products and solutions continues to expand.

- John Chambers

Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. A good product manager is the CEO of the product. Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product.

- Ben Horowitz

I am someone who tweets about what I have for breakfast, what I have for lunch, what I have for dinner, and for 99.99999 percent of the world, it’s useless. It’s meaningless. But for my mother, she loves it.

- Jack Dorsey

I will not lose, for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so it evens up for me.

- Jay-Z

That Newport store was really the beginning of where Walmart is today. We did everything. We would wash windows, sweep floors, trim windows. We did all the stockroom work, checked the freight in. Everything it took to run a store. We had to keep expenses to a minimum. That is where it started, years ago. Our money was made by controlling expenses. That, and Sam always being so ingenius. He never stopped trying to do something different. One thing, though: I never forgave him for was making me clean out that damned ice cream machine.

- Bud Walton

History recalls the remarkable resilience of the territory’s people.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Take calculated risks. Act boldly and thoughtfully. Be an agile company.

- Ray Kroc

The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense.

- John C. Maxwell

A business that looks orderly says to your customer that your people know what they’re doing.

- Michael Gerber

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