Notable Quotables

I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”

- Ben Horowitz

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

- Peter Drucker

Madness is however an affliction which in war carries with it the advantage of SURPRISE.

- Winston Churchill

Your business plan is fluid, not concrete. Once you a build plan, the market place validates what works and what does not. Be flexible and evolve your business strategy.

- David Nilssen

If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.

- Jeff Bezos

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

- Winston Churchill

Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

- Thomas Edison

A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today.

- Peter Thiel

The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market?

- Peter Thiel

We were old sinners – but when we came to Christ we are not sinners anymore.

- Joel Olsteen

When it’s too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley.

- Sergey Brin

The thing about information is that information is more valuable when people know it. There’s an exception for business information and super timely information, but in all other cases, ideas that spread win.

- Seth Godin

The torch relay is an excellent embodiment of all that the Olympic Games have come to symbolise – a celebration of the human spirit. Personally to me, it represents striving to be the best in whatever we do, never giving up despite the odds, and a commitment to health and fitness.

- Lakshmi Mittal

Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.

- Walt Disney

Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.

- Zig Ziglar

We were always trying to look for people who could help us beyond what we were doing.

- Phil Knight

Be frank. Reporters know when your story is all hype and no substance. Be honest with them.

- Michael Levine

Do you know how many companies have wanted me to do an energy drink for them because I named my book ‘Crush It!’? It might be fun one day, but right now I think it would undermine the personal brand I’ve built.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I can’t afford to be indifferent to politics, but I don’t have personal ambitions.

- Vagit Alekperov

Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we’re afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.

- Seth Godin

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know ‘No, he couldn’t have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.’

- Steve Wozniak

You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.

- Jack Ma

When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?

- Jack Welch

Treasure the love you have received above all. It will survive long after your gold and good health have vanished.

- Og Mandino

I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been

- Sam Walton

Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.

- James C. Collins

I want to change history, do something important in my life, and influence individuals like we have with millions of small businesses on Alibaba. Then they love and respect you because you made their life important.

- Jack Ma

I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.

- Joel Olsteen

I never took classic business classes in college, so I don’t have the background that any of the people running large companies have.

- Howard Schultz

Of this I am quite sure. If we open up a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

- Winston Churchill

I think we are not serious about attacking the long-term debt problem, and that’s one of the things that he’s going to have to find a way to get on the agenda.

- Michael Bloomberg

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 greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

- Peter Drucker

The economy of Hong Kong was considerably stable in 2000. However, as the global economy experienced a slowdown since the beginning of 2001, the confidence of local home purchasers remained low notwithstanding that Hong Kong followed the footsteps of the United States of America in announcing consecutive reductions of interest rates as well as a series of measures implemented by the Government to stabilise local property prices.

- Lee Shau Kee

We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun together.

- Walt Disney

I came over from Wal-Mart to help set up Sam’s. Since we were patterned after PRICE CLUBS, sometimes we copied them without exactly knowing what we were doing. We were bringing a West Coast idea to the Midwest, and we didn’t know how it would be received. I remember one idea that didn’t transfer too well. Price Club had a huge stack of wine in front of its stores. We bought the same amound for our stores in the Midwest and we learned the hard way that Midwesterners aren’t exactly wine drinkers. (on competition)

- Ron Loveles

If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if you – the probable outcome is failure.

- Elon Musk

[That was the case Wednesday night, when Cisco executives talked about results for the fiscal second quarter (which closed on Jan. 26). Chambers and chief financial officer Larry Carter spoke only about the next quarter, when revenue growth from the second fiscal quarter is expected to be nil or in the low single digits.] Our visibility is still very limited, … If there’s one lesson we’ve learned over the past year, it’s how quickly things can change.

- John Chambers

Getting things straight in your head is a major achievement because there’s so much clutter out there. You’ve got to push aside the static to really hear the music.

- Stephen Wynn

Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.

- Steve Ballmer

The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people – including my ex-wives.

- Ronald Perelman

Businesses often forget the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliever good service from unhappy employees.

- Tony Hsieh

OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me ‘Trey’ because I’m William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I’m also known.

- Bill Gates

In reality it is the focus on the first three D’s that ultimately gains you the data, and the dollars you need to become very, very rich…in other words the dollars are derived from having a dream, being dedicated, and having the drive to win.

- Robert Kiyosaki

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.

- Steve Jobs

We are continuing to see a number of signs that could be interpreted with the appropriate caveats as optimistic.

- John Chambers

Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.

- John D. Rockefeller

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man…Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters – seldom in any school of writing.Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object….we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration:’The world is my country; to do good my religion.’Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in ‘The Rights of Man’, and that genius busy at his favorite task – liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, ‘The Rights of Man’ yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke’s effort in his ‘Reflections’.Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him.’Tom Paine is quite right,’ said Pitt, the Prime Minister, ‘but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.’Here we see the progressive quality of Paine’s genius at its best. ‘The Rights of Man’ amplified and reasserted what already had been said in ‘Common Sense’, with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France.So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre’s enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument.But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of ‘The Age of Reason’ and now turned his time to the latter part.Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events ‘The Age of Reason’ appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle – a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking.

- Thomas Edison

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

- Winston Churchill

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.

- Winston Churchill

Focus on your people – Without employees and customers, your’re going nowwhere.

- David Green

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

Cuando dos socios siempre están de acuerdo, uno de ellos no es necesario.

- Dale Carnegie

Cold steel and discipline and the slight capital surplus necessary to move and organise armies constituted the sole defences.

- Winston Churchill

Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph: a beginning, a struggle and a victory.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Like technical debt, management debt comes in too many different forms to elaborate entirely, but a few salient examples will help explain the concept. Here are three of the more popular types among startups: 1. Putting two in the box 2. Overcompensating a key employee, because she gets another job offer 3. No performance management or employee feedback process

- Ben Horowitz

Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. So there’s no – you can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.

- Steve Martin

Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

- Bill Gates

We are consolidating our position as one of the leading technology companies in the automotive industry. Research and development expenditure of another 6 percent of our sales or around €2.1 billion is fueling our capacity for innovation. There are very few companies in the industry that are able to operate in these dimensions.

- Elmar Degenhart

Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.

- Seth Godin

If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.

- Elon Musk

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Corporations that navigate through these rough times will prosper as the region inevitably enters a new era of prosperity.

- Cheng Yu-tung

In between personal sales (salespeople obviously required) and traditional advertising (no salespeople required) there is a dead zone.

- Peter Thiel

The more we share what’s happening around us, the more we understand how someone lives their life. The greater the understanding we have, the more empathy we have for each other. By and large, that reduces conflicts.

- Jack Dorsey

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

- Bill Gates

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

Some libertarians say, ‘Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.’ But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn’t earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.

- Ben Horowitz

You don’t drown by falling into water. You only drown if you stay there.

- Zig Ziglar

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

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

- Walt Disney

I’m not speaking defeat into my future. I’m not speaking failure over my life. I will turn it around and speak favor into my future. I will declare, I’m blessed. I’m strong. I’m healthy. This will be a great year.” When you do that, you are blessing your future.

- Joel Olsteen

The group has continued to dedicate itself to its core businesses in property, infrastructure development, hotel operations and telecommunications. As for our operations in China, we expect to reap good returns from the investments in infrastructure, government housing and city core redevelopment projects as time goes by. Our strategic foothold in telecommunications will allow us to become an important player in the telecom industry.

- Cheng Yu-tung

If you can dream it, you can achieve it. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.

- Ma Huateng

Start believing today that things are going to change for the better. Your best days are still out in front of you.

- Joel Olsteen

Being productive gives people a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that loafing never can.

- Zig Ziglar

Now that we had a name, we had to have a trademark for the side of the shoe. It was 1971, and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million, so I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State, and there was a woman there saying, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money for the dress for this prom,’ And I said, ‘I have a job for you.’ I paid her $2 an hour, and she spent 17 and a half hours. So $35 and she came up with what is now the swoosh.

- Phil Knight

Lo que una persona diga de ti no define quién eres. Su opinión de ti no determina tu dignidad propia. Deja que eso te resbale como si fuera agua sobre el plumaje de un pato. Esa persona tiene todo el derecho a tener una opinión, y tú tienes todo el derecho a pasarla por alto.

- Joel Olsteen

I may be over the top on this, but I just don’t want to like my competitors. I want my people to believe that whenever he and our other competitors succeed, we will be less able to do all the things we want to do.

- Phil Knight

To be willing to do new things you don’t think you’ll like requires you to prefer the unknown. Not just to tolerate it, but to prefer it. One way to achieve that is to set out to experience things you’re sure you won’t like. To have conversations that are frightening. Becoming generous beyond measure, just to see what happens. And most of all, setting out to fail. Failing helps you see how far is too far, failing helps remind you that failing isn’t fatal, and most of all, failing opens you up to succeeding.

- Seth Godin

As a general thing, I have not ‘duped the world’ nor attempted to do so… I have generally given people the worth of their money twice told.

- P.T. Barnum

I was leading a lot of idea and the vision for where the product was going. Ev [Evan Williams] was funding and supporting what we were doing. He put the shelter over our heads. And Biz [Stone] was just an amazingly creative guy.

- Jack Dorsey

The Obama representatives like Robert Gibbs attack people viciously, but people like me will not be silent and will answer them back.

- Donald Trump

The Costa Rican government is prioritizing laying fiber optic over paving roads. Costa Rica is trying to become one of the Internet societies. This is happening throughout the world.

- Reed Hastings

This proves our strategy is working in terms of the convergence of voice, video and data.

- John Chambers

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

- Albert Einstein

If you want to build lifelong, loyal friendships, if you want to build trust, learn to protect your family members and friends even when they make mistakes.

- Joel Olsteen

Stubborn isn’t a word I would use to describe myself, pigheaded is more appropriate.

- Michael Bloomberg

We don’t know exactly how it will work. Advertisers want greater access, better accountability.

- Sergey Brin

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