Notable Quotables

Even if you don’t have the perfect idea to begin with, you can likely adapt.

- Victoria Ransom

Sometimes, “never let them see you sweat,” is truly bad advice. The work of an individual who cares often exposes the grit and determination and effort that it takes to be present.Perfecting your talk, refining your essay and polishing your service until all elements of you disappear might be obvious tactics, but they remove the thing we were looking for: you.

- Seth Godin

A lady came up to me one day and said ‘Sir! You are drunk’, to which I replied ‘I am drunk today madam, and tomorrow I shall be sober but you will still be ugly.

- Winston Churchill

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

- Winston Churchill

Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.

- Colin Powell

Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it’s about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it’s less than one ton. It’s an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.

- Bill Gates

Getting knocked down in life is a given. Getting up and moving forward is a choice.

- Zig Ziglar

There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. It’s not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well.

- George Soros

Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

- Winston Churchill

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

- Richard Branson

Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.

- Seth Godin

Consider this: you are today what you believed about yourself yesterday. And you will be tomorrow what you believe about yourself right now.

- Joel Olsteen

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

- Larry Ellison

Do what you want to do. Do what you like to do.

- Lei Jun

I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going. Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.

- Michael Gerber

I don’t use my brain about the creative thing. From a business standpoint, I instinctively do things: when I get something right, it’s never because I use my brain

- Russell Simmons

What this industry is about is back to the basics in the new Internet economy; and the basics are profitability, cash flow, productivity and market-share gains.

- John Chambers

If my job would have been to sell someone something they didn’t need, I would not have been very good at it.

- Pat McGovern

Don’t kill competition. Competition is healthy for businesses. It keeps you – the entrepreneur – on your toes.

- Aliko Dangote

Maybe I was accepted to Harvard only because of my tennis skills, since I definitively had no great academic achievements. I was 17 and only thought about surfing and playing tennis. I had almost never left Rio de Janeiro and had never been to the United States.

- Jorge Paulo Lemann

Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.

- P.T. Barnum

In fact, stories only magnify the need to have something remarkable (and honest) to say.

- Seth Godin

Politics are close to me, but there are different ways of participating in politics.

- Vagit Alekperov

Getting over the war was biggest adversity I have ever faced.

- Jack Nadel

There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.

- Ray Dalio

Government isn’t that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you’ve got to have commercial companies do it.

- Elon Musk

I’m a lad of the ‘60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.

- Richard Branson

They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision-making. Rather they consider virtuosity in manipulating a great many variables a symptom of sloppy thinking. They want to know what the decision is all about and what the underlying realities are which it has to satisfy. They want impact rather than technique, they want to be sound rather than clever.

- Peter Drucker

Many people spend more time in planning the wedding than they do in planning the marriage.

- Zig Ziglar

What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

- Elon Musk

Americans believe cotton is best, but we’ve invented new fabrics that will change your lifestyle.

- Tadashi Yanai

The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.

- Herb Kelleher

Chance can allow you to accomplish a goal every once in a while, but consistent achievement happens only if you love what you are doing.

- Bart Conner

Definiteness of purpose is the starting point from which one must begin. He recognized, too that definiteness of purpose of takes on animation, life, and power when backed by a burning desire to translate that purpose into its material equivalent. – Napoleon Hill (on leadership and vision)

- Napoleon Hill

Where I get my energy is: ‘How can I make it better?’

- Sara Blakely

Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization’s history. For some reason that simple truth has evaded everybody.

- Stephen Wynn

You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.

- Reid Hoffman

It’s the little things that are vital. Little things make big things happen.

- John Wooden

I think when companies are struggling, they don’t want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren’t interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it’s like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That’s slanted the whole thing quite a bit.

- Ben Horowitz

You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.

- Jack Welch

The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.

- Peter Drucker

We think that athletes are human beings and have foibles just like human beings do…

- Phil Knight

I really chess-play culture shifts. I’m really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That’s what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there.

- Jack Welch

The public is upset. If they haven’t lost their job, they know somebody that has. If they haven’t lost their house, they know somebody that has. What do you do? When something’s wrong, it’s government’s job to fix it, it must be government that’s responsible for causing it.

- Michael Bloomberg

We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today.

- Dale Carnegie

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

- Bill Gates

We are in control of the one asset that we all give the most f#%ks about, and that is time.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends coming in.

- John D. Rockefeller

At an early age, my mother gave me this feeling that anything is possible, and I believe that.

- Howard Schultz

If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.

- Ben Horowitz

The worse a situation becomes the less it takes to turn it around, the bigger the upside.

- George Soros

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

- Peter Thiel

The slowdown in futures orders clearly signals that revenue growth in the second half of fiscal 1998 will be below our previous expectations. This is largely a result of the slowdown in the Asia Pacific market, where we now anticipate more moderate revenue growth in fiscal 1998 after increasing 84 percent on a constant dollar basis in fiscal 1997.

- Phil Knight

[In January 2011] I think the important thing for Twitter is that it works on any technology.

- Jack Dorsey

Planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out.

- Peter Thiel

Failure to me became not trying versus not succeeding.

- Sara Blakely

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

God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.

- Joel Olsteen

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

- Bill Gates

It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.

- Dale Carnegie

If you’re a Wal-Mart of a Meijer you can draw the shoppers without using signs to advertise your specials, … But when you’re a little guy, you really depend on those signs.

- Michael Ward

just like most nightmares, it’s not that big a deal and is reversible.

- Timothy Ferriss

What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

- Peter Thiel

I’m a positive person, so I don’t get bogged down with it. If you’re expecting that, if you wall in that, if you practice that, then you’ll attract what you fear.

- Denzel Washington

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure – the law firms, the real estate, all that – that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

- Elon Musk

I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope. Causing people to have better relationships. I’m not leading them to some false God or something like that.

- Joel Olsteen

Entrepreneurs must think in specifics with laser-like precision.

- Jack Nadel

When you view marketing from the vantage point of the guerrilla, you realize that it’s your opportunity to help your prospects and customers succeed. They want to succeed at earning more money, building their company, losing weight, attracting a mate, becoming more fit, or quitting smoking. You can help them. You can show them how to achieve their goal. Marketing is not about you. It’s about them. I hope you never forget that.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

I run a bunch of charities and I say this line to people: ‘I am somebody who has always been helped.’ A little thing like that can make people believe it.

- Russell Simmons

The reason Steve Herrell’s shop did so well is that it was famous for having a line! People brought folks from out of town to have the experience.

- Seth Godin

I’m a reverend and a pastor. A pastor of the church. I go by usually pastor

- Joel Olsteen

I like to play cards. I’m not very good, because I don’t want to calculate, I just play by instinct. But I’ve learned a lot of business philosophy by playing poker.

- Jack Ma

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

- James C. Collins

I’m a strange mixture of my mother’s curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother’s father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

- Rupert Murdoch

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

- Winston Churchill

Learn from the past, but don’t live there. Build on what you know so that you don’t repeat mistakes. Resolve to learn something new every day. Because every 24 hours, you have the opportunity to have the best day of your company’s life.

- Harvey Mackay

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