Notable Quotables

You either trust someone day one until they prove you wrong, or you say, ‘I don’t trust you until you show me I can trust you.’ I’m the latter.

- Charles Ergen

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

- Jeff Bezos

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.

- Peter Thiel

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

- John Chambers

Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.

- Seth Godin

I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know anything about the speaker so there’s nothing that makes me want to get up early and go to it. I might catch it on TV.

- John Chambers

You can market your ass off, but if your product sucks, you’re dead.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Online I see people committing ‘social media suicide’ all the time by one of two ways. Firstly by responding to all criticism, meaning you’re never going to find time to complete important milestones of your own, and by responding to things that don’t warrant a response.

- Tim Ferris

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

- Jack Welch

Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that’s really powerful.

- Reid Hoffman

Lots of people will give you advice… and depending upon how well they know you, the advice might be valid or not so valid.

- Abigail Johnson

Self-discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think you can’t control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.

- Napoleon Hill

You may think you’ve got a long way to go, but you need to look back at how far you’ve already come. You may not be everything you want to be but atleast you can thank God that you’re not what you used to be.

- Joel Olsteen

I never thought much about success early on. I only thought about being a comedian – or just being in show business, is really more accurate.

- Steve Martin

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.

- Napoleon Hill

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.

- Nolan Bushnell

People stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.

- Winston Churchill

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

- Seth Godin

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.

- James Cameron

I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

- Elon Musk

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

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

Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

- Peter Thiel

All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.

- Seth Godin

Xiaomi looks a bit like Apple but is really more like Amazon with some elements of Google.

- Lei Jun

The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

- Peter Thiel

And so I believe that God plays this enormous role in my life. And I believe that it’s my obligation to give back and to follow the rules that were set. And it also gives me an enormous sense of my own place and an enormous sense of stability.

- Ronald Perelman

If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act.

- Bill Gates

No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.

- Michael Bloomberg

Desire is created when something happens in your life that suddenly changes the way you see yourself in relationship to your future.

- Zig Ziglar

This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.

- Peter Thiel

But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1.

- Peter Thiel

Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.

- Winston Churchill

CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.

- Peter Thiel

1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization.

- Peter Thiel

If you’re single and you want to get married, put an empty photo album on your table. That’s where you’re going to put your wedding photos. When you see it, you’re moving toward it.

- Joel Olsteen

One definition of hope is happy anticipation of something good.

- Joel Olsteen

Self-disciplined begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think, you can’t control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.

- Napoleon Hill

A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa.

- Dale Carnegie

Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.

- Sergey Brin

I know Bo Xilai well. But our relationship was based on our work, we didn’t have a personal relationship.

- Wang Jianlin

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

- Winston Churchill

The debt limits have to come down. The whole world of debt has to be changed as far as this country is concerned. We have to create jobs and we have to create them rapidly because if we don’t things are just going to head in a direction that’s going to be almost impossible to recover from.

- Donald Trump

We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life. And it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001.

- Michael Bloomberg

To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.

- Winston Churchill

Losing an A is a sin. Love ‘em, hug ‘em, kiss ‘em, don’t lose them! We conduct postmortems on every A we lose and hold management accountable for losses.

- Jack Welch

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.

- Theodore Roosevelt

[On working at Nike for 48 years] In those 48 years, I have never had a promotion. but it had its other benefits.

- Phil Knight

In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

- Harry Truman

This shows you are never too old to get surprised.

- Jack Welch

A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.

- Ben Horowitz

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

- Bill Gates

Even though I’m a hype man myself, I like the practicality of it all. People who understand how to turn a profit. At the end of the day, this is still business so I’m looking for real practical knowledge of how to actually make money, not necessarily raise it.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

For those already successful, money can become a controlling factor in life and make you a slave to it. One way to avoid that – Philanthropy.

- Lee Shau Kee

the more ‘Yeses’ we can, at the very outset, induce, the more likely we are to succeed in capturing the attention for our ultimate proposal.

- Dale Carnegie

It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor.

- Ray Kroc

Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today. So think thoughts of hope and confidence and love and success.

- Dale Carnegie

All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory’ was the motto of the King’s Guard in ancient Greece.

- Dale Carnegie

We’ve used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we’re running a federal deficit that’s 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It’s more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.

- Warren Buffett

Everything about my journey to get Spanx off the ground entailed me having to be a salesperson – from going to the hosiery mills to get a prototype made to calling Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. I had to position myself to get five minutes in the door with buyers.

- Sara Blakely

Hong Kong has gone through countless difficult moments in the past. Our belief in our abilities and our determination to work for a better future have helped us overcome all obstacles.

- Cheng Yu-tung

My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.

- Dale Carnegie

My saddlebags are why Spanx exist! Now that I have a baby I also have a muffin top.

- Sara Blakely

You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.

- Larry Ellison

If you can’t make 40% on your money in Russia, you’re a fool.

- Simon Reuben

We are very happy to be reporting that our pro-forma earnings passed the $1 billion mark for the first time.

- John Chambers

If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.

- Elon Musk

Learning to be a CEO through classroom training would be like learning to be an NFL quarterback through classroom training.

- Ben Horowitz

Southwest consistently turns a profit because they have an employee ownership program that gives their employees a sense of ownership that is very real. When the company does well financially, the employees do well financially. When the company struggles, the employees struggle.

- Clay Clark

I think the most important factor in getting out of the recession actually is just the regenerative capacity of – of American capitalism.

- Warren Buffett

It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.

- Dale Carnegie

It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you’re doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.

- Ray Dalio

I’m pretty good at sticking to what I know. You don’t see me social commentating on health-care or presidential debates. I talk about what I know because I’m petrified of being wrong.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.

- P.T. Barnum

My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids.

- Joel Olsteen

The challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us.

- Seth Godin

I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let’s examine the facts.

- Dale Carnegie

I forgive all personal weaknesses except egomania and pretension.

- Herb Kelleher

I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

- Warren Buffett

By altering our attitudes we can alter our lives.

- Zig Ziglar

When you’ve got a strong enough why, you can always find the how.

- Zig Ziglar

It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

You watch television and see what’s going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing’s going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress.

- Stephen Wynn

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

- Elon Musk

What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people – ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.

- Larry Ellison

If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.

- Zig Ziglar

It helps to have founded and run a company if you’re going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.

- Ben Horowitz

Brands mature over time, like a marriage. The bond you feel with your spouse is different than when you first met each other. Excitement and discovery are replaced by comfort and depth.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.

- Steve Martin

Getting over the war was biggest adversity I have ever faced.

- Jack Nadel

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