I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.
- John D. Rockefeller
Notable Quotables
If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they’ve done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress.
- Elon Musk
The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.
- Bill Gates
I believe life is a series of near misses. A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see And pursuing that vision.
- Howard Schultz
People don’t believe what you tell them.They rarely believe what you show them.They often believe what their friends tell them.They always believe what they tell themselves.
- Seth Godin
When you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.
- Zig Ziglar
To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.
- Peter Drucker
The Dip creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.
- Seth Godin
Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.
- John C. Maxwell
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say what is and what is definitely not possible.
- Henry Ford
Let your motto then always be ‘Excelsior’, for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.
- P.T. Barnum
I’d always try to remind managers at every level that they had to share my passion for developing people.
- Jack Welch
You may never get to that perfect world that you’re waiting for where everything’s going to be perfect and you got that much money and your house paid off.
- Joel Olsteen
There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.
- Elon Musk
Hi-tech is best managed by younger people.
- Lee Shau Kee
If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.
- Mario Andretti
My first account was Neiman Marcus. I cold-called them just like I had cold-called businesses when I was selling fax machines for seven years.
- Sara Blakely
If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
- Dale Carnegie
By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.
- Bill Gates
One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.
- Ben Horowitz
That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
- Peter Thiel
People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.
- Jerry Seinfeld
People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature—without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.
- Peter Drucker
He wants to do something amazing in your life. Get in agreement and say, God, this is for me today. I’m raising my expectations. I’m shaking off doubt, negativity, disappointments, self-pity, little dreams, and little goals, and God, I will make room for a flood of Your goodness.
- Joel Olsteen
Determine your destiny or somebody else will.
- Jack Welch
I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.
- Bill Gates
Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started ‘Wine Library TV.’ They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The Internet is the Viagra of big business.
- Jack Welch
The Internet moves very fast. In the old world, we could afford to sit and analyze forever. But in the new world, the first mover has the advantage.
- Raymond Kwok
I always saw myself wanting to do something deemed successful and good at the same time.
- Howard Schultz
I think of L.A. as truly the melting pot. It’s basically a mini-country unto itself.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.
- Peter Thiel
I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.
- Steve Ballmer
Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.
- Richard Branson
Isn’t it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?
- Zig Ziglar
I was so mad I ran a personal record.
- Phil Knight
Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.
- Winston Churchill
If you want to be inventive — you have to be willing to fail.
- Jeff Bezos
The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.
- Jeff Bezos
We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1. In fact, there’s an epidemic of chronic disease.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Bordeaux would be naive not to recognize that Robert Parker was driving the brand equity. If the next generation doesn’t care about Chateau Pichon-Lalande, then you have a problem.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Leadership, very simply, is about two things: 1. Truth and trust. 2. Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter.
- Jack Welch
The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.
- Andrew Carnegie
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
- Winston Churchill
People are more comfortable learning about wine because now they can just Google, you know, ‘Soave,’ and say, ‘Oh, O.K., cool.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
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
Investing in Chicago property is just Wanda’s first move into the U.S. real estate market.
- Wang Jianlin
What is measured improves.
- Peter Drucker
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
Incineration does not equal human digestion, eating a fireplace log will not store the same number of calories as burning one will produce.
- Timothy Ferriss
Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.
- Ben Horowitz
At the end of the day, I guess my feeling is that it was sort of a failure to communicate.
- Phil Knight
I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.
- Bill Gates
The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.
- Michael Gerber
The value we create is directly related to how much valuable information we can produce, how much trust we can earn, and how often we innovate.
- Seth Godin
I believe that God breathed life into every person and that every person is made in the image of God and you have accept them as they are, on their journey. I’m not here to preach hate or push people down.
- Joel Olsteen
Often people fail to start or complete a task because they don’t see any connection between what they’re doing and what they really want to accomplish in life.
- John C. Maxwell
Haiti should remind us all that there is an immediate need to invest in and promote long-term development projects that are sustainable, scalable, and proven to work.
- Bill Gates
I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.
- Warren Buffett
Why don’t we have enough teachers of math and science in the public schools? One answer is well, if they knew the subject well, they’d also know enough to work for Google or Goldman Sachs or God knows where.
- James Simons
I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.
- Jeff Bezos
Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you’re doing. It doesn’t know what you know.
- Larry Page
Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
- Winston Churchill
Of course I’m an egoist. Where do you get if you aren’t?
- Winston Churchill
My natural inclination to be improv rather than an educated character serves me well.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The danger of the Web is that you can go from idea to public announcement in under ten minutes.
- Seth Godin
Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.
- Jerry Seinfeld
If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.
- Elon Musk
I’d rather have 1% of 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own.
- John D. Rockefeller
Group projects are the exception in school, but they should be the norm.
- Seth Godin
It’s the power of the brand. We’ve never formally advertised.
- Sara Blakely
Where you start is not as important as where you finish.
- Zig Ziglar
A business is a complex system of inter-operating systems.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.
- Bill Gates
Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it’s a good thing they’ll be reading a newspaper on a screen.
- Bill Gates
God will lead you from where you are right now to where He wants to you to be, if you’ll let Him.
- George Foreman
We have set the course for the future and are very happy about a successful generational change at the top of the company.
- Stefan Quandt
It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.
- Timothy Ferriss
Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
- Ben Horowitz
We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life. And it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001.
- Michael Bloomberg
If you want to spend time saying this is cool, you’re going to get your ass kicked.
- Phil Knight
Our goal here in New York is to ensure that every child who graduates high school is ready to start a career or start college and to dramatically increase the number of students that graduate from college.
- Michael Bloomberg
The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
- Peter Thiel
Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.
- Peter Thiel
Be honest, always.
- Jack Dorsey
when the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives-and we cannot prevent them-let us, too, accept the inevitable. And then get busy and pick up the pieces.
- Dale Carnegie
A person convinced against their will Is of the same opinion still.
- Dale Carnegie
The earnings from Hong Kong and China Gas and rental property portfolio serve as a solid base for the Group’s sustainable growth.
- Lee Shau Kee
[On becoming in 1969 a full-time employee of his five year old company] There were nervous moments. Every time I brought a fresh letter of credit home and it said, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Knight guarantee liabilities to the tune of $300,000,’ Penny’d say, ‘We don’t have $300,000.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t care. Just sign the thing.’
- Phil Knight
Delegating doesn’t mean passing off work you don’t enjoy, but letting your employees stretch their skills and judgment.
- Harvey Mackay
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
Many brilliant people believe that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains, ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.
- Peter Drucker
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labour ofthinking-if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts thatbolster up what we already think-and ignore all the others! We want only the facts thatjustify our acts-the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justifyour preconceived prejudices!As Andre Maurois put it: Everything that is in agreement with our personal desiresseems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage.Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems?Wouldn’t we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, ifwe went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot ofpeople in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that twoplus two equals five-or maybe five hundred!
- Thomas Edison
Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with taking a company from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs six times more often.
- James C. Collins
Customers tend to avoid a restaurant that’s going aswamp in its own sludge.
- Ray Kroc
Success is not measured by what you do compared to what others do, it is measured by what you do with the ability God gave you.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s hard to make a living when you are in school…
- Michael Dell
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
- Winston Churchill
