It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.
- Steve Jobs
Notable Quotables
A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.
- John C. Maxwell
What we want to watch is whether this is a short-term bump or not.
- John Chambers
Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. …
- Dale Carnegie
America, for me, is the country where, if you have something great to offer, you’ll be valued highly.
- Tadashi Yanai
The man who cannot control himself, can never control others. Self-control sets a mighty example for one’s followers, which the more intelligent will emulate.
- Napoleon Hill
Hong Kong has, throughout it’s history, experienced periods of uncertainties… I believe that the virtues of Hong Kong people – diligent, flexible and entrepreneurial – will once again overcome the obstacles before us.
- Cheng Yu-tung
In war and policy one should always try to put oneself in the position of what Bismarck called “the Other Man”. The more fully and sympathetically a Minister can do this the better are his chances of being right. The more knowledge he possesses of the opposite point of view, the less puzzling it is to know what to do. But imagination without deep and full knowledge is a snare.
- Winston Churchill
Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.
- Winston Churchill
I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.
- Warren Buffett
If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
Practice, practice, PRACTICE in speaking before an audience will tend to remove all fear of audiences, just as practice in swimming will lead to confidence and facility in the water. You must learn to speak by speaking.
- Dale Carnegie
You need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
- Ben Horowitz
Men sometimes stumble over the truth, but often pick themselves up and hurry off as though nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.
- Og Mandino
Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.
- Warren Buffett
That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
- Peter Thiel
With the attention I got on my wealth, I thought I would have become a source of resentment, but it is just the other way around – it just generates that much more ambition in many people.
- Azim Premji
I think it’s funny to be delicate with subjects that are explosive.
- Jerry Seinfeld
When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.
- Larry Ellison
Comprehensive after-sale property management service is as important as building quality.
- Lee Shau Kee
A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.
- Yoda
Twitter is about simplicity.
- Jack Dorsey
The best way to be missed when you’re gone,Is to stand for something when you’re here.
- Seth Godin
Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they’ve discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.
- Seth Godin
Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.
- Ben Horowitz
Sales is a simple conversation where I ask you questions and I relate to your answers.
- Bryan Smith
if you want to keep happiness , you have to share it !
- Dale Carnegie
Humility is becoming a lost art, but it’s not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.
- Harvey Mackay
Deadlines aren’t bad. They help you organize your time. They help you set priorities. They make you get going when you might not feel like it.
- Harvey Mackay
Dad never had the kind of ambition or confidence to build much of a business on his own, and he didn’t believe in taking on debt. Sam Walton on the traits that make a great leader. It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Sam Walton
Someday, man will harness the rise and fall of the tides, imprison the power of the sun, and release atomic power.
- Thomas Edison
Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.
- Richard Branson
My personal opinion is that I’m in the media too much. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. I would like to be without any extra visibility.
- Viktor Vekselberg
Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts … genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation … the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality …though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]
- Winston Churchill
It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?
- Peter Thiel
m reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States – for the century, at least.
- Elon Musk
In 20 years from now we will all be able to click and watch TV.
- Reed Hastings
True economy consists in always making the income exceed the out-go. Wear the old clothes a little longer if necessary; dispense with the new pair of gloves; mend the old dress: live on plainer food if need be; so that, under all circumstances, unless some unforeseen accident occurs, there will be a margin in favor of the income.
- P.T. Barnum
Every patient is a consumer, and every consumer is a potential patient. What NantWorks is doing is building the world the way Da Vinci saw it, and augmenting every frame a human being sees as they work, live and play.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, someway, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.
- Joel Olsteen
Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.
- Yoda
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
- James C. Collins
If you don’t love what you’re doing with unbridled passion and enthusiasm, you’re not going to succeed when you hit obstacles.
- Howard Schultz
There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.
- Roger Staubach
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. Why are we such fools—such tragic fools?
- Dale Carnegie
Don’t criticize them, they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.
- Dale Carnegie
Enemy submarines are to be called U-Boats. The term submarine is to be reserved for Allied under water vessels. U-Boats are those dastardly villains who sink our ships, while submarines are those gallant and noble craft which sink theirs.
- Winston Churchill
If you don’t agree with the core principles, which are the premise of that compromise, then you have to have what I call principled confrontation. And so that is the thing that we do that I think can rub some people the wrong way.
- Travis Kalanick
Relationships are leverage. If you give value to someone else first, you have leverage.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards- the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.
- Walt Disney
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
Your workforce is your most valuable asset. The knowledge and skills they have represent the fuel that drives the engine of business – and you can leverage that knowledge.
- Harvey Mackay
The Western world loves liberalisation, provided it doesn’t affect them.
- Azim Premji
My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.
- Bill Gates
No one knows more about the way you think than you do.
- Seth Godin
My belief as a Christian is when we receive Christ as salvation, that that gives us a guarantee for Heaven.
- Joel Olsteen
Get ready, get ready, get ready, to get ready.
- T.D Jakes
Don’t count the things you do. Do the things that count.
- Zig Ziglar
Nature is truly wonderful. Only man is truly foul.
- Thomas Edison
One of the statistics that always amazes me is the approval of the Chinese government, not elected, is over 80 percent. The approval of the U.S. government, fully elected, is 19 percent. Well, we elected these people and they didn’t elect those people. Isn’t it supposed to be different? Aren’t we supposed to like the people that we elected?
- Bill Gates
No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.
- Ben Horowitz
This is like the Six Sigma approach to quality. Six Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units. The problem is that once you’re heading down this road, there’s no room left for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. Either you rolled ten strikes or you didn’t. Organizations that earn dramatic success always do it in markets where asymptotes don’t exist, or where they can be shattered. If you could figure out how to bowl 320, that would be amazing. Until that happens, pick a different sport if you want to be a linchpin.
- Seth Godin
This I do know beyond any doubt, Regardless of what you are doing, if you PUMP LONG AND HARD ENOUGH and ENTHUSIASTICALLY ENOUGH, sooner or later the EFFORT will bring forth the REWARD.
- Zig Ziglar
Even if we laid off 100 percent of the employees, the infrastructure costs would still kill us without a sharper sales ramp.
- Ben Horowitz
Ebooks had to happen.
- Jeff Bezos
You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, not by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it.
- Carlos Castaneda
My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.
- Winston Churchill
It’s absolutely a necessary and inevitable evolution in retailing (of Wal-Mart putting small stores out of business), as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car, and the dissappearance of the buggy whip makers. The small stores (and DJs) were destined to dissappear, at least in the numbers they once existed., because the whole thing is driven by customers, who are free to choose where to shop.
- Sam Walton
A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.
- John Shedd
I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.
- Seth Godin
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
I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages. An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside,”
- James C. Collins
I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.
- Henry Ford
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
- Maya Angelou
Timid salesmen have skinny kids.
- Zig Ziglar
I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.’ Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.
- Larry Ellison
My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.
- Bill Gates
My wife thinks she’s better than me at puzzles. I haven’t given in on that one yet.
- Bill Gates
The things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.
- Ben Horowitz
I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.
- Warren Buffett
Capital isn’t scarce, vision is.
- Sam Walton
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.
- Yoda
Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.
- Dale Carnegie
I spend a lot of time reading.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft
- Bill Gates
By the end of the war (the civil war) John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags, or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.
- Ron Chernow
[On exporting sports shoes from Japan to the US]The best hope for exports lay with Onitsuka Company. So I made a cold call on them.
- Phil Knight
We are each responsible for our own life – no other person is or even can be.
- Oprah Winfrey
The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.
- Peter Thiel
If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you maycome to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
- Winston Churchill
You can take from every experience what it has to offer you. And you cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed by another.
- Oprah Winfrey
God can do what humanoids cannot.
- Clay Clark
Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution—whether they’re in sales, marketing, or advertising—has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.
- Peter Thiel
If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.
- Seth Godin
Lack of ambition to aim above mediocrity.
- Napoleon Hill
I don’t want anybody to not recognize how appreciative I am of the volume of e-mails I get.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Being nice to people is just 20% of providing good customer service. The important part is designing systems that allow you to do the job right the first time. All the smiles in the world aren’t going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants,
- James L. Heskett
We’re trying to identify the key influencers and make them distribution points.
- Jack Dorsey
From the economic slowdown after the financial crisis in 1997 through the economic boom in 2007, the motherland has been supporting Hong Kong in recovering from adversity; on the other hand, Hong Kong has been actively cooperating with the motherland in going international.
- Cheng Yu-tung
