The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
There are not many companies in China that dare to say in public, ‘We don’t offer bribes’, or companies that operate only by market rules.
- Wang Jianlin
Ahhh! Yoda’s little friend you seek!
- Yoda
If you’re in business, first and foremost, you have to be nice. Show your customers that you care.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Companies, exist and evolve over time and in fact they have multiple founding moments.
- Jack Dorsey
The Internet is the easiest thing to get into. To be an Internet retailer, you just get that URL.
- Bill Gates
Let’s realise that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let’s realise that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself o herself, and condemn us in return.
- Dale Carnegie
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it’s hard to trust somebody that you don’t know.
- Ben Horowitz
Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.
- Rupert Murdoch
London, a city where creativity and innovation have always flourished, provides a significant home for Starbucks and a significant gateway into Europe.
- Howard Schultz
With communication technology in general, there’s a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world’s entire population using one communication technology, that’s a big deal. It’s beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it’s a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.
- Ben Horowitz
Progress really is possible.
- Michael Bloomberg
If there is any one secret of success,’ said Henry Ford, ‘it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
- Dale Carnegie
Refrain from throwing the executive under the bus.
- Ben Horowitz
“What would you do if capital were free?” is a dangerous question to ask an entrepreneur. It’s kind of like asking a fat person, “What would you do if ice cream had the exact same nutritional value as broccoli?”
- Ben Horowitz
The world is still in deleveraging.
- Ray Dalio
…The greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.
- Seth Godin
Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four. I read the front-page headlines through.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you’re a surfer, you just want to surf. You don’t know if anyone’s going to see you, and you don’t really care if they see you. You just live for that feeling.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Every time you walk down the street people are screaming, ‘You’re fired!’
- Donald Trump
When men are fighting for their lives they are not often disposed to be complimentary to those who are trying to kill them.
- Winston Churchill
The point is that you can’t be too greedy.
- Donald Trump
I believe it’s less risky long-term to embrace change.
- Charles Ergen
Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy. The other side of it is that you can’t cut enough costs to save your way to prosperity.
- Howard Schultz
Exercise is better than any medicine I can take, exercise and sleep.
- Aliko Dangote
just like most nightmares, it’s not that big a deal and is reversible.
- Timothy Ferriss
We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.
- Seth Godin
I’ve got to keep breathing. It’ll be my worst business mistake if I don’t.
- Steve Martin
Fortune favors the bold.
- Virgil
As long as you’re living in regret, focused on the negative things of the past, you won’t move ahead to the bright future God has in store. You need to let go of what didn’t work out. Let go of your hurts and pains. Let go of your mistakes and failures. You can’t do anything about the past, but you can do something about right now.
- Joel Olsteen
To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.
- Elon Musk
Few people are logical. Most of us are prejudiced and biased. Most of us are blighted with preconceived notions, with jealousy, suspicion, fear, envy and pride.
- Dale Carnegie
Great ideas originate in the muscles.
- Thomas Edison
I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along with it.
- Walt Disney
I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.
- Bill Gates
A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.
- Zig Ziglar
Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.
- Jack Welch
You didn’t grow up driving…you figured it out.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people – including my ex-wives.
- Ronald Perelman
It’s hard to say with 100 percent certainty that we’re totally out of it (the dry pattern), and it’s going to shift. But it’s leaning in that direction.
- Ed Clark
When you encourage others, you in the process are encouraged because you’re making a commitment and difference in that person’s life. Encouragement really does make a difference.
- Zig Ziglar
Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.
- Bill Gates
Opportunity is often missed because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison
We do not covet anything from any nation except their respect.
- Winston Churchill
You read these management books that say, ‘These are the hard things about running a company.’ But those aren’t really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.
- Ben Horowitz
By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world. Now I am.
- Elon Musk
I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t won that AOL deal
- Sergey Brin
I can’t really comment on rumors.
- Larry Page
I had a feeling once about Mathematics – that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me – the Byss and Abyss. I saw – as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor’s Show – a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.
- Winston Churchill
When you marry operating excellence with innovation, you multiply the value of your creativity.
- James C. Collins
As an entrepreneur, I try to push the limits. Pedal to the metal.
- Travis Kalanick
Cherish your visions and dreams as they are the children of your soul. The blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
- Napoleon Hill
Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.
- Bill Gates
Somebody needs what you have to give. It may not be your money; it may be your time. It may be your listening ear. It may be your arms to encourage. It may be your smile to uplift. Who knows? Maybe just like that little baby, putting your arm around somebody and letting him or her know that you care can help begin to heal that person’s heart. Maybe you can give a rescuing hug.
- Joel Olsteen
Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.
- Dale Carnegie
When I started the diamond business, no black person, period, was in it to do what we’re trying to do to change the industry. So I like to do things that I see clearly that are in my, you know, scope. And then, I had to figure how I get talented or smart business people around me to execute. That’s what I have to do.
- Russell Simmons
This is indicative of how quickly CEO caution can put the foot on the brake.
- John Chambers
Politicians make decisions in favor of their interest groups or their supporters back in their hometowns.
- Tadashi Yanai
I’ve got to confess I’m a pragmatic optimist myself.
- Zig Ziglar
I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.
- Sam Walton
The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.
- Timothy Ferriss
For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.
- Steve Wozniak
When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.
- Ben Horowitz
The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.
- Bill Gates
I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living.
- John D. Rockefeller
No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.
- Winston Churchill
Today, all arrows point toward the biotech, nanotech, and information technology industries, and the convergence among them.
- Jack Welch
I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.
- Elon Musk
A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.
- Peter Drucker
I loved doing ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Because you have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.
- Steve Martin
If my mother hadn’t been the most patient person in the world, I might never have gone to school.
- Ben Horowitz
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure
- Abraham Lincoln
I’m not afraid to call a wine that tastes like Skittles or green peppers mixed with orange marmalade. I’ll say, ‘It tastes like chicken.’ I mean, that’s not what people think of when they think of wine, but that’s what it tastes like to me and it hits home.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Here’s how I work: It’s 2013, and most marketers are operating like it’s 2009. I’m always trying to market like it’s 2015, but not like it’s 2020. A lot of my contemporaries who understand where the world is going, go too far out, and aren’t practical. I have always prided myself on being visionary, with a heavy practicality.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
You are the only person on earth who can use your ability. It’s an awesome responsibility.
- Zig Ziglar
As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.
- Peter Thiel
And I keep saying, whether you like the president or not, everybody has to pull together and help the president because, as the president goes, so goes the country, as the country goes, so goes your job, your ability to feed your family, your government.
- Michael Bloomberg
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
- Bill Gates
Even leaders with the best of intentions can have dumb ideas sometimes, and if you have good people around you, then hopefully they’ll stop you before you’ve done too much damage.
- David Novak
A goal properly set is halfway reached.
- Zig Ziglar
Wanamaker learned this lesson early, but I personally had to blunder through this old world for a third of a century before it even began to dawn upon me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticise themselves for anything no matter how wrong it may be.
- Dale Carnegie
The squeaky wheel always getting the grease.
- James Taylor
Many people are unhappy and are not experiencing life to its fullest because they’ve closed their hearts to compassion, they are motivated by only what they want and what they think they need. They rarely do anything for anybody else unless they have an ulterior goal in mind. They are self-involved and self-centered.
- Joel Olsteen
Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
- Dale Carnegie
I encourage all my key people to bring their mobiles when they travel.
- Raymond Kwok
No matter what’s happening, choose to be happy. Don’t focus on what’s wrong. Find something positive in your life. Thank God for the small things.
- Joel Olsteen
I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.
- Winston Churchill
If people look inward, they would see the opportunities for greatness.
- Aliko Dangote
[On the three keys to Twitter’s success.] The first lesson: Draw. The most important thing you can do with an idea: get it out of your head. Second lesson: Luck. Be able to recognize when luck is happening around you. Third lesson: iteration. Originally Twitter asked ‘What’s your status?’ Bonus fourth lesson: know when to stop. Sometimes put the idea away, that idea will often emerge later.
- Jack Dorsey
Let go of yesterday. Let today be a new beginning and be the best that you can, and you’ll get to where God wants you to be.
- Joel Olsteen
There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.
- Winston Churchill
It’s tangible, it’s solid, it’s beautiful. It’s artistic, from my standpoint, and I just love real estate.
- Donald Trump
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
The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.
- Peter Drucker
Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.
- Peter Drucker
I was born in a family with a strong military background, so I chose to be a soldier.
- Wang Jianlin
Be kind.
- Jack Dorsey
If a product’s future is unlikely to be remarkable – if you can’t imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product – it’s time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.
- Seth Godin
Go as far as you can see. When you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.
- Zig Ziglar
