Notable Quotables

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

- Elon Musk

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

- Bill Gates

We’re profitable and have the potential to be very profitable, … We generate cash from operations of over $1 billion per quarter. We have $19 billion in cash and equivalents in an industry that is in debt. We’ve gained more market share than we’ve ever gained in this last quarter. We’ve got the customer loyalty and strategy for where the industry’s going, which is combining networks for service providers and enterprises. So I’m very optimistic about our future if we execute right.

- John Chambers

Frequently I’ll be interviewing with somebody or talking and in about 15 minutes they’ll interrupt me mid-stream and say, ‘Oh my God, you’re nothing like I’d thought you’d be.’

- Larry Ellison

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

Money isn’t everything… but it ranks right up there with oxygen.

- Zig Ziglar

The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.

- Seth Godin

Success (a win) doesn’t make you, and failure (a loss) doesn’t make you.

- Zig Ziglar

The secret to modern life is finding the measure in time management. I have two kids, career and I travel, and I don’t think my life is any different than most couples. The most valuable commodity now for many people is time and how to parcel that out.

- Hugh Jackman

Organizations that achieve both market and operating focus are nearly unbeatable Customers don’t buy products or services. They buy results. They were designed to break what Schlesinger and his colleagues called the cycle of failure practiced by many of Au Bon Pain’s competitors who paid their employees and managers low wages, offered them little training and other support, and suffered high turnover of employees and limited customer loyalty as a result.

- James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser and Leonard

I don’t blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you I would undoubtedly feel just as you do.(…) You can say that and be 100 percent sincere, because if you were the other person you, of course, would feel just as he does (…) Suppose you had inherited the same body and temperament and mind (…) Suppose you had had his environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was – and where he was. For it is those things -and only those things – that made him what he was. (…) You deserve very little credit for being what you are – and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.

- Dale Carnegie

If you give a good thing to the world, then over time your karma will be good, and you’ll receive good.

- Russell Simmons

It’s not about size, it’s about your ability to make a difference. At that small size, collaboration is all the more important.

- John Chambers

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

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.

- Warren Buffett

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

- Bill Gates

Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking tartar sauce with you.

- Zig Ziglar

I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

- Steve Martin

It’s not time,” “Take it easy,” “Wait and see,” “It’s someone else’s turn” – none of these stalls are appropriate for a leader in search of change. There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.

- Seth Godin

your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse 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.

- Dale Carnegie

If you investigate companies that have failed, you will find that many employees knew about the fatal issues long before those issues killed the company. If the employees knew about the deadly problems, why didn’t they say something? Too often the answer is that the company culture discouraged the spread of bad news, so the knowledge lay dormant until it was too late to act. A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved. The resulting action item for CEOs: Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.

- Ben Horowitz

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I don’t like to beat people down. They need to be lifted up.

- Joel Olsteen

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.

- Arthur Golden

Starbucks has a role and a meaningful relationship with people that is not only about the coffee.

- Howard Schultz

The Cul-de-Sac ( French for “dead end” ) … is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes.

- Seth Godin

It’s easier to explain price once than to apologize for quality forever.

- Zig Ziglar

Man’s only limitation within reason lies in his development and use of his imagination

- Napoleon Hill

My Golden Rule of Networking is simple: Don’t keep score.

- Harvey Mackay

technology is important—you can’t remain a laggard and hope to be great. But technology by itself is never a primary cause of either greatness or decline.

- James C. Collins

I don’t think so, in that Virgin is already a global brand. Brands like Amazon have had to spend hundreds of millions of pounds you know, building their brands, whereas Virgin is already well-known around the world.

- Richard Branson

Sales were limited by how many shoes we had, shoes were limited by how many dollars we had to order them.

- Phil Knight

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

Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.

- Ben Horowitz

Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that’s really powerful.

- Reid Hoffman

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

- Walt Disney

Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking.It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every dayto deliver your message with authority.You should write one.

- Seth Godin

The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.

- Timothy Ferriss

If you want to reach a goal, you must ‘see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.

- Zig Ziglar

The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.

- Bill Gates

In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history.

- Michael Dell

I love technology, and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.

- Steve Martin

It’s God’s will for you to live in prosperity instead of poverty. It’s God’s will for you to pay your bills and not be in debt.

- Joel Olsteen

Worrying about the past or the future isn’t productive. When you start chastising yourself for past mistakes, or seeing disaster around every corner, stop and take a breath and ask yourself what you can do right now to succeed.

- Harvey Mackay

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

- Bill Gates

However, when you add competition to consume scarce resources, it’s hard to see how a global plateau could last indefinitely. Without new technology to relieve competitive pressures, stagnation is likely to erupt into conflict. In case of conflict on a global scale, stagnation collapses into extinction.

- Peter Thiel

You can succeed at almost anything for which you have unbridled enthusiasm.

- Zig Ziglar

China is a government-oriented economy. No one can say he can run his business entirely without government connections. Anybody who says that he or she can do things alone… is a hypocrite.

- Wang Jianlin

The courage take tough yes-or-no decisions. Look, the world is filled with gray. Anyone can look at an issue from every different angle. Some smart people can –and will-analyze those angles indefinitely. But effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information.

- Jack Welch

Never forget, the real secret of giving advice is this: Once you’ve given it, don’t concern yourself with whether it is followed or not, and refrain from saying ‘I told you so.’

- Harvey Mackay

If I’d had some set idea of a finish line, don’t you think I would have crossed it years ago?

- Bill Gates

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

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

Winners expect to win, they expect victory, and they expect success!

- Zig Ziglar

Ultimately you want to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind

- Sergey Brin

We knew that Lyft was going to raise a ton of money. And we are going [to their investors], Just so you know, we’re going to be fund-raising after this, so before you decide whether you want to invest in them, just make sure you know that we are going to be fund-raising immediately after.

- Travis Kalanick

The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.

- Peter Drucker

Husbands and wives, first be faithful to each other. Second, keep the romance going all of your life by courting each other every day.

- Zig Ziglar

Although my spelling is still sometimes poor, I have managed to overcome the worst of my difficulties through training myself to concentrate.

- Richard Branson

And if I were the president, I’d go out there and I’d emphasize the things I have done, and I’d say, ‘Some things haven’t worked, and I’m sorry about that, but I keep trying.’ And I’m – and I think the president is a very viable candidate, and you’re going to have a real horse race here no matter who the Republican nominee is.

- Michael Bloomberg

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

It’s pretty chilly by southern California standards.

- Ed Clark

By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.

- Lee Shau Kee

The better at communicating you are, and the more people you communicate to, the better your cash flow will be.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.

- James C. Collins

Businesses often forget the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliever good service from unhappy employees.

- Tony Hsieh

If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

- Bill Gates

20% of what you do accounts for 80% of your results

- Brian Tracy

I remember thinking quite logically that I didn’t want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.

- Bill Gates

Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. To know all is to forgive all.

- Dale Carnegie

If you look at coffee, tea, food and juice, we think there are inherent opportunities. If you look at health bars or grab-and-go products that are in our stores, we think we can significantly enhance them and make them more widely available.

- Howard Schultz

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

- Joel Olsteen

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

- Peter Drucker

I have worked at Nike and its predecessor company for 48 years. Some might call me a short timer.

- Phil Knight

The more seriously you take your growth, the more seriously your people will take you.

- John C. Maxwell

This is not checkers; this is motherfuckin’ chess. Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left. There is always a move.

- Ben Horowitz

We have merely scratched the surface of the store of knowledge which will come to us. I believe that we are now, a-tremble on the verge of vast discoveries – discoveries so wondrously important they will upset the present trend of human thought and start it along completely new lines .

- Thomas Edison

The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.

- Warren Buffett

A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.

- Zig Ziglar

I’m killing two birds at once, so to speak. Animal-based food kills people. This way, by going vegan… we get healthy and save animals. I’m being selfish, too, because if I can get my employees healthier, we cut down on sick days and gain more productivity.

- Stephen Wynn

A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.

- Ben Horowitz

If you complain you will remain, if you praise you will be raised.

- Joel Olsteen

Even god doesn’t propose to judge a man till his last days, why should you and I?

- Dale Carnegie

I think my story says that, when women are given the chance and the opportunity, that we can achieve a lot. We deliver.

- Sara Blakely

Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.

- Winston Churchill

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

- George Soros

EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

- Peter Thiel

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