Notable Quotables

We saw – we conducted the experiment. I mean, it’s been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we’re gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.

- Larry Ellison

The problems forced us to take a hard look at what we were doing, what was going wrong, what we were good at, and where we wanted to go.

- Phil Knight

Advertising is to a genuine article what manure is to land, – it largely increases the product.

- P.T. Barnum

Pessimism doesn’t grow your business or even maintain the status quo. The pessimists on your staff make the job harder for everyone around them. They make difficulties out of opportunities.

- Harvey Mackay

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

- Winston Churchill

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

- Reed Hastings

Positional leaders ignore the fact that every person has hopes, dreams, desires, and goals of his own. And leaders must bring their vision and the aspirations of the people they lead together in a way that benefits everyone.”

- John C. Maxwell

t’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.

- Warren Buffett

The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself.

- Napoleon Hill

Applied Faith – Faith is a state of mind through which your aims, desires, plans and purposes may be translated into their physical or financial equivalent.

- Napoleon Hill

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

- Napoleon Hill

I think every Internet user likes personalization.

- Ma Huateng

The problem with pity parties is very few people come, and those who do don’t bring presents.

- Zig Ziglar

Flaming enthusiasm, backed by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.

- Dale Carnegie

Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today. Go another mile!

- Og Mandino

Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon. Sorry I’m all out of cards. Boy, does your country ever eat up business cards.

- Phil Knight

A long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which insured his success on the battlefield. He was about to send his armies against a powerful foe, whose men outnumbered his own. He loaded his soldiers into boats, sailed to the enemy’s country, unloaded soldiers and equipment, then gave the order to burn the ships that had carried them. Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, ‘You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no choice—we win, or we perish!’ They won. Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. Only by so doing can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win, essential to success.

- Napoleon Hill

Well, you have the public not wanting any new spending, you have the Republicans not wanting any new taxes, you have the Democrats not wanting any new spending cuts, you have the markets not wanting any new borrowing, and you have the economists wanting all of the above. And that leads to paralysis.

- Michael Bloomberg

The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

- Seth Godin

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

- Winston Churchill

The misconception that aid falls straight into the hands of dictators largely stems from the Cold War era.

- Bill Gates

The conquest was not achieved without one frightful convulsion of revolt. “In this year A.D. 61”, according to Tacitus, “a severe disaster was sustained in Britain.” Suetonius, the new governor, had engaged himself deeply in the West. He transferred the operational base of the Roman army to Chester. Because it was the centre of Druid resistance he prepared to attack “the populous island of Mona [Anglesey], which had become a refuge for fugitives, and he built a fleet of flat-bottomed vessels suitable for those shallow and shifting seas. The infantry crossed in the boats, the cavalry went over by fords: where the water was too deep the men swam alongside of their horses. The enemy lined the shore, a dense host of armed men, interspersed with women clad in black like the Furies, with their hair hanging down and holding torches in their hands. Round this were Druids.

- Winston Churchill

From age 16, I lived and breathed wine. I read every magazine and book about wine.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I’m not in competition with anybody but myself. My goal is to beat my last performance.

- Celine Dion

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Through the wisdom of its government leaders and the entrepreneurship of its private sector, India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy, … Cisco believes that the Internet, and related technologies, will be a key enabler for India to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation.

- John Chambers

If you spend money on what you want, you’ll beg for what you need.

- T.D Jakes

If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it.

- Peter Thiel

Buoyant consumer confidence will continue to underpin retial spending and hence rental growth for shopping centres. The office market is expected to perform well on the back of tight supply being met by keen demand from companies looking for expansion opportunities.

- Lee Shau Kee

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

- Seneca

Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.

- Henry Ford

Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.

- Sergey Brin

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

- Joel Olsteen

Steve Jobs had very strong feelings about what makes a company great, what makes products great. He more or less chose Tim Cook to be in that role, in that position.

- Steve Wozniak

You’ve got to be before you can do and do before you can have.

- Zig Ziglar

The future is in green energy, it’s in making steel for energy-efficient cars.

- Alexei Mordashov

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

- Peter Drucker

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years.

- Bill Gates

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

We are each responsible for our own life – no other person is or even can be.

- Oprah Winfrey

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

- Napoleon Hill

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

- Donald Trump

I’ve built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players…I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other. Because they’ve never had a chance to do that before. And they don’t want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates.

- Steve Jobs

When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.

- Larry Ellison

I think there’s a lot of merit in an international economy and global markets, but they’re not sufficient because markets don’t look after social needs.

- George Soros

Transparency is terribly important in a situation like this, as a quick reaction time, because news today is not immediate. It travels globally on the Internet. In our YouTube culture, dramatic videos take on a life of their own, beyond anyone’s control. – (on crisis management)

- David Novak

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved. What the executive needs are criteria which enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.

- Peter Drucker

SLOW DANCE Have you ever watched kids On a merry-go-round? Or listened to the rain Slapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight? Or gazed at the sun into the fading night? You better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Do you run through each day On the fly? When you ask: How are you? Do you hear the reply? When the day is done, do you lie in your bed With the next hundred chores Running through your head? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Ever told your child, We’ll do it tomorrow? And in your haste, Not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch, Let a good friendship die Cause you never had time To call and say, Hi”? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. When you run so fast to get somewhere You miss half the fun of getting there. When you worry and hurry through your day, It is like an unopened gift thrown away. Life is not a race. Do take it slower. Hear the music Before the song is over.

- Timothy Ferriss

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

- Steve Jobs

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

Measuring requires, first and foremost, analytical ability. But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible rather than abused to control people from the outside and above—that is, to dominate them. It is the common violation of this principle that largely explains why measurement is the weakest area in the work of the manager today. As long as measurements are abused as a tool of control (for instance, as when measurements are used, as a weapon of an internal secret police that supplies audits and critical appraisals of a manager’s performance to the boss without even sending a carbon copy to the manager himself) measuring will remain the weakest area in the manager’s performance.

- Peter Drucker

Life’s a journey. It’s a journey about discovering limits.

- Larry Ellison

As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot.

- Ray Kroc

Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.

- Zig Ziglar

Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.

- Seth Godin

Money will buy you a bed, but not a good night’s sleep, a house, but not a home, a companion, but not a friend.

- Zig Ziglar

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

- Ben Horowitz

Desire is the ingredient that changes the hot water of mediocrity to the steam of outstanding success.

- Zig Ziglar

Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very different things.

- Timothy Ferriss

I am pleased with the strides we’ve made in our global equipment business where revenues grew 41 percent this past quarter and 37 percent year-to-date, … The strong dollar continues to negatively impact our European results constant dollar revenues in Europe were up 23 percent in the second quarter.

- Phil Knight

I demand pretty aggressive goal setting and a commitment to measured progress towards those goals because I don’t like surprises. I don’t even like good surprises.

- Abigail Johnson

Motivation gets you going and habit gets you there.

- Zig Ziglar

As kids, we all worked for the company in one way or another. I got to work behind the candy counter or run the popcorn stand when I was five years old. The business was part of life, and it was always included in the dinner conversation. We learned a lot about the debt it took to open new stores, and I worried about it. I remember confiding to my girlfriend one time – crying and saying, I don’t know what we’re going to do. My daddy owes so much, and he won’t quit opening.

- Alice Walton

It’s not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There’s nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.

- Bill Gates

It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.

- Elon Musk

If that doesn’t seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word “google” is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—as a verb.

- Peter Thiel

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

Stealing Coach Wooden’s sets of three, I have come up with a formula for success no matter what kind of business you happen to be in: 1) Make sure you have the right people around you; 2) Have fun and drive results by recognizing the achievements of others; and 3) Be a passionate learner, and pass on what you know to others. Not only will this make you a success in business, but it will make you a success in life.

- David Novak

The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.

- Peter Drucker

I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another.

- Seth Godin

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

- Elon Musk

The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.

- Peter Thiel

Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.”

- Ben Horowitz

When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.

- Joel Olsteen

First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.

- Professor Harry A. Overstreet

Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.

- Larry Ellison

Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable

- Peter Thiel

There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire. If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain – do something to make more money yourself.

- Gina Rinehart

We take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work.

- Ben Horowitz

The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.

- Larry Ellison

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.

- Thomas Edison

There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.

- Henry Ford

I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.

- Elon Musk

IQ is a commodity, data is a commodity. I’m far more interested in watching people interact at a restaurant with their smartphone. We can all read ‘Tech Crunch,’ ‘Ad Age.’ I would rather be living in the trenches. I would rather be going to Whole Foods in Columbus Circle to watch people shop with their smartphones.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

- Ben Horowitz

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