Notable Quotables

The three short years I spent at Harvard, where I lived with excellent people, taught me not only that I must know how to choose my partners but also that choosing excellent partners is a skill you can learn. Obviously, when you spend time with the best, you learn how to choose among them.

- Jorge Paulo Lemann

One of the main reasons people fail to reach their full potential is because they are unwilling to risk anything. They are fearful of losing, failing, or getting hurt and just want to do the things they believe will keep them safe.

- Zig Ziglar

if you want to achieve consistent performance, you need both parts of a 20 Mile March: a lower bound and an upper bound, a hurdle that you jump over and a ceiling that you will not rise above, the ambition to achieve and the self-control to hold back.

- James C. Collins

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

- Reed Hastings

Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris.

- Peter Thiel

Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.

- Larry Ellison

Politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business. Large stores, gilt signs, flaming advertisements, will all prove unavailing if you or your employees treat your patrons abruptly. The truth is, the more kind and liberal a man is, the more generous will be the patronage bestowed upon him.

- P.T. Barnum

Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.

- Bill Gates

RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.

- Jack Welch

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.

- Henry Ford

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm.

- Vince Lombardi

Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.

- Peter Thiel

We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade. We don’t decide for you.

- Larry Ellison

Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.

- Ben Horowitz

If you think the people you attract could be better, then it’s time for you to improve yourself.

- Napoleon Hill

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

Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.

- Ben Horowitz

You’re not better than anybody else, but you’re not less than anybody else. You’re a child of the Most High God.

- Joel Olsteen

There’s a difference between telling people what to do and inciting a movement.

- Seth Godin

Looking? Found someone you have, eh?

- Yoda

If you talk about Cabernet and Merlot-based value between $10 and $25, I will tell you that Bordeaux is the best value in the world.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

When evaluating the results, we should not overlook the fact that there was, in some cases, very weak growth in Europe, Russia, and South America. There were also significant exchange rate fluctuations. In addition, the mild winter at the end of 2014 had a negative impact on the winter tire business in Europe. The driving force behind the sales development once again came from China and North America. In light of this, it is remarkable that profit after taxes of just under €2.4 billion or €11.88 per share could be achieved.

- Elmar Degenhart

If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can.

- Seth Godin

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

- Alexander Graham Bell

Out-innovating them is the way to beat China. And to do everything that we do in this country to support innovative policy, that drives innovation and new products and more jobs and creates jobs. You can’t – you can’t put a wall up around here. We tried that in the ’30s. It didn’t work.

- Jack Welch

Thinking back to old-time computer programming in the days before programming languages supported internationalization, we used to have to “internationalize” our code. We called this internationalization process “I18N” for short (localization was L10N), which meant I followed by eighteen letters followed by N.

- Ben Horowitz

Litigation is the basic legal right which guarantees every corporation its decade in court.

- David Porter

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 follow your favorite company or organization. You can also mix that in with your family and your social network and talk about all these interests in real time. That’s the value, not the brand ‘Twitter.’ Twitter just provides the venue for it.

- Jack Dorsey

So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.

- Dale Carnegie

Let’s think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it’s okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea… well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you’re not gonna get people coming up with ideas.”

- Elon Musk

We can consider 140 characters to be the full story, but it’s not. It’s just a caption. A headline for something broader.

- Jack Dorsey

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

I’m not trying to follow a set of rules and stuff. I’m just living my life.

- Joel Olsteen

You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.

- Dale Carnegie

Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

- Peter Thiel

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

- Ben Horowitz

When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?

- Ray Kroc

The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.

- Peter Thiel

This could easily end up one of the driest winters ever, unless things switch around.

- Ed Clark

The competitive advantages the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.

- Seth Godin

When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right.

- Rupert Murdoch

So sure, start with a slogan. But don’t bother wasting any time on it if you’re merely going for catchy. Aim for true instead.

- Seth Godin

If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost.

- Zig Ziglar

Enduring great companies don’t exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.

- James C. Collins

Will flash cards invade the disk drive makers’ core markets and supplant magnetic memory? If they do, what will happen to the disk drive makers? Will they stay atop their markets, catching this new technological wave? Or will they be driven out?

- Clayton M. Christensen

If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.

- Ben Horowitz

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Don’t sling mud at others or soon you will find yourself in a deeper hole than when you started.

- Clay Clark

Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.

- Larry Ellison

You want to do good things, and once you’ve done a couple of good things in a row, you think ‘Well gee, let’s not mess this up.’ But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

To my mind, there is a solution which has to do with democracy, because democratic governments are subject to the will of the people. So, if the people will it, you can actually create international institutions through the democratic states.

- George Soros

We know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition.

- Peter Thiel

All human beings are the same. In the United States, people come from all over the world, all races, all backgrounds. And they’re all doing what they want, many scoring huge successes. When I saw that, I became more open. It freed my soul.

- Masayoshi Son

All a bliss state like California does is spoil you.

- Phil Knight

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.

- Jeff Bezos

Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker – whom I had hired to manage the store from TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen and I had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could alone. We pledges houses and property, everything we had.. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.

- Sam Walton

A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate.

- Donald Trump

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

- John C. Maxwell

I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Sam phoned to tell me he was going to start a wholesale club. It was no surprise. He is notorious for looking at what everybody else does, taking the best of it, and then making it better.

- Sol Price

It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change – as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

- Bill Gates

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

- Winston Churchill

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

- Bill Gates

Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.

- Napoleon Hill

I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.

- Winston Churchill

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

- Napoleon Hill

As an entrepreneur, remove obstacles for your team. If there is anything that is holding the team back, get it out of the way.

- David Nilssen

It is better to act too quickly than it is to wait too long.

- Jack Welch

Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.

- Elon Musk

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation.

- Bill Gates

Success is one thing — but impact is another.

- Ray Lewis

What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

- Steve Martin

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.

- Henry Ford

One of my biggest personal holdings is Rotana. That company has a very dominant force in the Middle East. It has around 45% of all the movie industry and around 75% of all the music.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Apart from banking facilities of a relatively small proportion which were raised in Renminbi, the majority of the Group’s funding facilities are obtained in Hong Kong Dollars and the Group’s exposure to foreign exchange fluctuation riks is therefore extremely small.

- Lee Shau Kee

Macau has been steady. The shocking, unexpected government is the one in Washington.

- Stephen Wynn

There is no such thing in the world as luck. There never was a man who could go out in the morning and find a purse full of gold in the street to-day, and another to-morrow, and so on, day after day: He may do so once in his life; but so far as mere luck is concerned, he is as liable to lose it as to find it.

- P.T. Barnum

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

- Henry Ford

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

- Jack Welch

Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius.

- Peter Thiel

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.

- Warren G. Tracy

The thing I lose patience with the most is the clock. Its hands move too fast.

- Thomas Edison

The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.

- Clayton M. Christensen

Too often we judge people based on our own backgrounds and experiences, but when you understand people’s stories, it’s easier to understand their demeanor.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Seth Godin

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

- Jeff Bezos

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