Notable Quotables

The difference between blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It’s scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.

- Russell Simmons

I find that a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced over whether or not I have bread

- Mitch Hedberg

Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.

- Ben Horowitz

Luck Is When Preparation Meets Opportunity.

- Seneca

Companies should not have a singular view of profitability. There needs to be a balance between commerce and social responsibility… The companies that are authentic about it will wind up as the companies that make more money.

- Howard Schultz

Starting a company is a very tough thing. There’s a friend of mine, Bill Lee, whose phrase is ‘starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.’ So you should certainly expect that it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be harder than getting a job somewhere by a pretty good margin and the odds of you losing the money that you invested or your friends invested is pretty high. I mean, those are just the basic facts. So if you don’t mind things being really hard and high risk, then starting a company is a good idea. Otherwise, it’s probably unwise. It will certainly stress you out. So I think you have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.

- Elon Musk

An organization takes its cue from the person on top. I always told our business leaders their personal intensity determined their organization’s intensity….For me intensityh covers a lot of sings. If there’s one characteristic all winners share, it’s that they care more than anyone else. No detail is too small to sweat or too large to dream. Over the years I have looked for this characteristic in the leaders we selected. It doesn’t mean loud or flamboyant. It’s something that comes from deep inside. Great organizations can ignite passion….Leaders must have courage to kick ass and break glass.

- Jack Welch

There was a moment when I was watching Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in ‘Badboys’ that I felt, you know, inspired. I don’t know if I was proud, because so many people do the work. Everyone’s part of a team that develops over the years and gives people chances. There have been some good moments watching people develop.

- Russell Simmons

Experience has proven that the best educated people are often those who are known as self-made, or self-educated. It takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated is one who has learned to get whatever he wants in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists no so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and peristently applied. Men are paid nor merely for tha they know, but more particulary for what they do with that which they know.

- Napoleon Hill

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

- Zig Ziglar

I’ve found reporters, editors, and producers to be an engaging lot overall, naturally curious and ever on the prowl for good stories.

- Michael Levine

On Facebook, the definition of great content is not the content that makes the most sales, but the content that people most want to share with others.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I guess Mr. Walton just had a personality that drew people in. He would yell at you from a block away, you know. He would just yell at everybody he saw, and that’s the reason so many liked him and did business in his store. It was like he brought in business by his being so friendly. (on role of managing partner)

- Inez Threet

I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.

- Oprah Winfrey

You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

- Russell Simmons

The sudden attacks on the United States of America brought about adverse effects on the global economy in the short term. However, Mainland China has until now been able to maintain its economic growth on a steady course.

- Lee Shau Kee

By faith you need to walk like a king, talk like a king, think like a king, dress like a king, smile like a king. Don’t go by what you see. Go by what you know. There is royalty in your DNA. You have the blood of a winner. You were created to reign in life.

- Joel Olsteen

Look we gave this thing a good run. We both know it’s not working out. Let’s wrap this thing up.

- Jack Welch

Some questions that I’ve found to be very effective in one-on-ones: If we could improve in any way, how would we do it? What’s the number-one problem with our organization? Why? What’s not fun about working here? Who is really kicking ass in the company? Whom do you admire? If you were me, what changes would you make? What don’t you like about the product? What’s the biggest opportunity that we’re missing out on? What are we not doing that we should be doing? Are you happy working here?

- Ben Horowitz

The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.

- Phil Knight

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

- Michael Bloomberg

Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself.

- Dale Carnegie

The real benefit of having goals is what you become by reaching them.

- Zig Ziglar

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

- Jeff Bezos

If I had to single out one element in my life that has made difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.

- Sam Walton

Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember, the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you.

- Zig Ziglar

So go ahead. Fall down. The world looks different from the ground.

- Oprah Winfrey

You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.

- Dale Carnegie

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.

- Peter Drucker

I know if I stopped hosting ‘Wine Library TV,’ we’d probably lose 75 percent of our audience, but the remaining 25 percent is still a big number.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Buddha said: ‘Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love,’ and a misunderstanding is never ended by an argument but by tact, diplomacy, conciliation and a sympathetic desire to see the other person’s viewpoint.

- Dale Carnegie

Yes, it’s absolutely true that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly – until you can learn to do it well.

- Zig Ziglar

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

- Bill Gates

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

“Everyone will think it’s stupid!””Everyone says it’s impossible.”Guess what? Everyone works in the balloon factory and everyone is wrong.

- Seth Godin

Hmm. In the end, cowards are those who follow the dark side.

- Yoda

These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.

- Winston Churchill

I’d say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that’s a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.

- Herb Kelleher

Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present, good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.

- Peter Thiel

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

- Napoleon Hill

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?

- Michael Bloomberg

When you set down the path to create art, whatever sort of art it is, understand that the path is neither short not easy. That means you must determine if the route is worth the effort. If it’s not, dream bigger.

- Seth Godin

In the United States, where we have more land than people, it is not at all difficult for persons in good health to make money.

- P.T. Barnum

I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

- Elon Musk

When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.

- Napoleon Hill

I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.

- Warren Buffett

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

- Larry Page

But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.

- Peter Thiel

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

- Jerry Seinfeld

‘You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‘Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.’

- Joel Olsteen

May the Force be with you.

- Yoda

Any great founders need to get out of the way of the company.

- Jack Dorsey

There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love.

- Buddha

One of the most distinguished psychiatrists living, Dr. Carl Jung, says in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul (*): During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life-that is to say, over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

- Dale Carnegie

It is my practice to try to understand how valuable something is by trying to imagine myself without it.

- Herb Kelleher

Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

- Peter Thiel

It is impossible to divide the interest of a country and a company that works on its soil.

- Vagit Alekperov

What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?

- Sam Walton

My financial service business is the absolute best thing I have done to empower the poor. I run many charities and fight many political causes, but my financial service company is the greatest gift I’ve given.

- Russell Simmons

To boil water, the MED is 212°F (100°C) at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it more boiled.” Higher temperatures just consume more resources that could be used for something else more productive.

- Timothy Ferriss

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent….

- Thomas Edison

People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Be factual. Lying is really, really a bad idea, mostly because they’ll find you out. And then you’ll never get another item in that outlet for as long as they remember you, which will be forever.

- Michael Levine

Creative leaders inherently know when rules need to be challenged, and they can see when a more flexible approach should be taken.

- John C. Maxwell

Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is my go-to song to pump myself up if I’m having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.

- Sara Blakely

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

- Winston Churchill

India has the potential to be our biggest market in Asia, bigger than China, in as much as two to five years.

- John Chambers

It is unhealthy to marinate in your own press clippings.

- Sam Walton

He listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.

- Ron Chernow

It is going to be a little, if you will, laboratory for sustainability in businesses of small scale

- Larry Ellison

The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must not look too good nor talk too wise.

- Dale Carnegie

When you are the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you are basically saying, ‘I’m right and everyone else is wrong.’ That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilaration and the same time an invitation to be attacked.

- Larry Ellison

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

- Mark Zuckerberg

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

- Winston Churchill

We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

- Michael Bloomberg

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.

- Napoleon Hill

Whether you’re talking about the core consumer or the person on the street, the principle is the same: you have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.

- Phil Knight

People who use time wisely spend it on activities that advance their overall purpose in life.

- John C. Maxwell

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

- Jerry West

The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.

- Dale Carnegie

If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Hedgehog Concept—disciplined action, following from disciplined people who exercise disciplined thought.

- James C. Collins

Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas.

- Seth Godin

I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized. I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You’re playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It’s hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.

- Steve Martin

I was uncomfortable with the timing, … We were getting millions less from the federal government for Medicaid and having to search for funds to restore some of those cuts and I just did not think it was right to put a pay raise on the board that would cost tens of millions of dollars.

- Michael Gerber

In creating an ideavirus, the advertiser creates an environment in which the idea can replicate and spread. It’s the virus that does the work, not the marketer.

- Seth Godin

The most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

- Ben Horowitz

don’t talk about the way you are. Talk about the way you want to be.

- Joel Olsteen

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