Notable Quotables

Anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble.

- Peter Thiel

I have found from costly experience that it is much easier to analyze the facts after writing them down. In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us reach a sensible decision. As Charles Kettering puts it: A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

- Dale Carnegie

If you don’t have public hangings for bad culture in a company, if you don’t take people out and let them say, they went home to spend more time with the family. It’s crazy.

- Jack Welch

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Constantly probe the people who report to you, and encourage them to probe you.

- Ray Dalio

Without passion, you don’t have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

- Donald Trump

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

- Bill Gates

The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is ‘Don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.’

- Ben Horowitz

Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad.

- Donald Trump

The difference between blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It’s scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.

- Russell Simmons

Value and purpose are about understanding the specific benefits you will help people receive if they receive what you have for them.

- Zig Ziglar

Value is achieved primarily through frontline employees who are satisfied, loyal, and productive, in part because of the high degree of capability they possess to deliver results to customers

- Service Profit Chain

When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges.

- Jack Handee

Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that’s something I’m accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn’t bother me.

- Timothy Ferriss

If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.

- Oprah Winfrey

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike”, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel

Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.

- Peter Thiel

They were going to get it all right the first time right… Open to change.

- Jack Dorsey

Anything you’re interested in the world – whether it be Charlie Rose or JetBlue or a public figure or your local coffee shop – they’re on Twitter and broadcasting what is interesting to them.

- Jack Dorsey

When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.

- Bill Gates

1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).

- Timothy Ferriss

There’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.

- Ben Horowitz

I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family that would have killed for each other – and we still are. x

- Richard Branson

School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.

- Reed Hastings

Did you know that nearly one in three children live apart from their biological dads? Those kids are two to three times more likely to grow up in poverty, to suffer in school, and to have health and behavioral problems.

- Tony Dungy

There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.

- Phil Knight

I loved couriers. You had this transfer of physical information happening throughout the city and the world. Someone picking up the package, putting it in a bag, going somewhere, taking it out of the bag, giving it to someone else. I thought that was so cool. I wanted to map it, to see that flow on a big screen.

- Jack Dorsey

I recall that Harry made a trip to San Bernardino about the time we were really starting to roll, and Dick McDonald asked him what he thought the future of McDonald’s would be. Harry told him that one day this company would be bigger than F. W. Woolworth. Dick really did a double take at that. He told me later, ‘I thought you had a genuine nut on your hands, Ray.’ But Harry knew exactly where he wanted to go, and he knew how to get there.

- Ray Kroc

Sometimes I say ‘Go to Joe’s Diner’ and [Siri] doesn’t know where Joe’s Diner is. And very often usually I find out that Android does.

- Steve Wozniak

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.

- Warren G. Tracy

Although it’s admirable to be ambitious and hard-working, it’s more desirable to be smart-working.

- John C. Maxwell

Oracle’s got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP’s got nothin’ but SuccessFactors until 2020.

- Larry Ellison

I seldom read anything that is not of a factual nature because I want to invest my time wisely in the things that will improve my life. Don’t misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with reading purely for the joy of it. Novels have their place, but biographies of famous men and women contain information that can change lives.

- Zig Ziglar

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

- Elon Musk

We have two turbines in our company: One is engineering, and the other is operations. And so our business people are on equal footing with our engineering and technology culture. Cars are moving because of what we do, so there’s an imperative to go beyond just the technology.

- Travis Kalanick

A knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization. It is meant for every one of the men I call executives.

- Peter Drucker

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

- Peter Drucker

The growth of an enterprise is no different from the self-improvement of human beings. It is a step-by-step procedure and an ever-lasting course of improvement, which requires staying in line with the era and taking up social responsibility.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.

- Oprah Winfrey

While we remain cautious about the implications of a brief pause in the current 10-year expansion of the U.S. economy, we believe that Cisco has never been better positioned to help our customers solve their two most important business issues: Increasing productivity and creating new sources of revenue.

- John Chambers

The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of the human body.

- Peter Drucker

Remember to celebrate milestones as you prepare for the road ahead.

- Nelson Mandela

Death will come, no matter what anyone may think about it. Accept it as a necessity, and pass the thought out of your mind…Death is mere transition. If death is not mere a change, or transition then nothing comes after death except a long, eternal peaceful sleep and sleep is nothing to be feared. Thus you may wipe out, forever, the fear of Death….a busy person seldom has time to think about dying. He finds life too thrilling to worry about death

- Napoleon Hill

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

- Elon Musk

Self-centered leaders manipulate when they move people for personal benefit. Mature leaders motivate by moving people for mutual benefit.

- John C. Maxwell

Don’t waste your energy trying to convince people to understand you. Your time is too valuable to try to prove yourself to people.

- Joel Olsteen

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

- Winston Churchill

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

- Dale Carnegie

Those people blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.

- Mary Kay Ash

Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural. People just don’t want to do it.

- Jack Welch

People are always coming up to me and saying, ‘I heard your dad’s speech, and it’s really great.’ And they’ll mention some place I didn’t even know my dad was going to.

- Bill Gates

Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.

- Peter Thiel

Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn’t. It’s just the opposite. What I think is brutal and false kindness is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don’t belong – just when the options are limited and they’re putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.

- Jack Welch

In order to become rich, you need to learn to build systems that can work without you. .

- Robert Kiyosaki

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

- Dale Carnegie

If you cannot persuade people to do things, you simply will not be a success because you are not an island unto yourself. Everything in life is about persuading people to do what you want them to do.

- David Robinson

Every well built house started in the form of a definite purpose plus a definite plan in the nature of a set of blueprints.

- Napoleon Hill

If you have the character to hang in there when its tough, you will develop or acquire every other characteristic necessary to WIN in the game of life.

- Zig Ziglar

Does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done in this assignment? The answer: it depends. In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

- Dale Carnegie

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.

- Walt Disney

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

- Peter Drucker

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

If GE’s strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.

- Jack Welch

I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.

- Sergey Brin

Clear your mind must be, if you are to find the villains behind this plot.

- Yoda

The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That’s a bittersweet ending.

- Timothy Ferriss

All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths.

- Napoleon Hill

Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest. Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends.

- Dale Carnegie

Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.

- Peter Thiel

Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.

- Bill Gates

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

- Warren Buffett

We’ve grown from 18% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry to 23% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry over the last five years. Profits are up over 70%, where the industry profit is up about 35%. Pretty good.

- Steve Ballmer

Cleantech shows the result: hundreds of undifferentiated products all in the name of one overbroad goal.

- Peter Thiel

Shaw once remarked: If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.

- Dale Carnegie

The first step is to establish that something is possible, then probability will occur.

- Elon Musk

I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized. I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You’re playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It’s hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.

- Steve Martin

The only time I really become discouraged is when I think of all the things I would like to do and the little time I have in which to do them.

- Thomas Edison

My biggest wish is for government, the private sector and all of us to work together to make the Philippines the best tourism destination in Southeast Asia.

- Henry Sy

while you can buy your way to growth, you absolutely cannot buy your way to greatness.

- James C. Collins

They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.

- Winston Churchill

Everybody was writing about computers and electronics, but all I really knew about was running. It’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life.

- Phil Knight

When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn’t allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in – if they could, they would do so.

- Bill Gates

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