If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’
- Henry Ford
Notable Quotables
There’s this myth that has been exacerbated by others that Starbucks means a $4 cup of coffee, which is not true.
- Howard Schultz
Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
- Elon Musk
I think Yahoo is a great company, with great assets.
- Jack Ma
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
- John D. Rockefeller
God would not have put a dream in your heart if He had not already given you everything you need to fulfill it.
- Joel Olsteen
We think of Starbucks not as a coffee company but a media company.
- Howard Schultz
Getting every employee’s mind into the game is a huge part of what the CEO job is all about. Taking everyone’s best ideas and transferring them to others it the secret. Nothing is more important.
- Jack Welch
The more you are grateful for what you have the more you will have to be grateful for.
- Zig Ziglar
My home is in Moscow and I have no plans to change this.
- Alisher Usmanov
I’m personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I’m not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.
- Elon Musk
We are gods in the chrysalis.
- Dale Carnegie
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
Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.
- Peter Thiel
Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.
- Aristotle
Do the Right Thing.
- Phil Knight
The Successful leader must understand and apply the principle of cooperative effort and be able to induce his followers to do the same. Leadership calls for power and power calls for cooperation.
- Napoleon Hill
The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist.
- Zig Ziglar
The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.
- Elon Musk
In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything.
- Peter Thiel
Over the past ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
- Ben Horowitz
Courage is on display every day, and only the courageous wring the most out of life.
- Zig Ziglar
The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.
- James C. Collins
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
Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?
- Ray Kroc
The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing because you think you can only do a little.
- Zig Ziglar
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
People who smile tend to manage, teach and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children.
- Dale Carnegie
I’m an entrepreneur. I’m not a politician.
- Robin Li
You can be in the storm, but don’t let the storm get in you.
- Joel Olsteen
Sure, ideas that spread, win, but ideas that don’t get spoken always fail.
- Seth Godin
Being a great leader means sometimes pissing people off.
- Colin Powell
We were comfortable with first-quarter results.
- John Chambers
Why do I need succession planning? I’m very alert, I’m very vibrant. I have no intention to retire.
- Sheldon Adelson
We subpoenaed him for the SAP trial and he was on the lam. The HP board sent him to Bolivia to talk to customers. Then they sent him to Mongolia to talk to customers, just out of reach of the federal subpoenas … the board figured out [later]: we should have left Leo in Mongolia.
- Larry Ellison
Reckless he is. Matters are worse.
- Yoda
I have always believed that if we do well, we must also do something to help others in society.
- Henry Sy
If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you. You will.
- Dale Carnegie
In 20 years from now we will all be able to click and watch TV.
- Reed Hastings
We were guerilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit.
- Phil Knight
Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most poor people live in the poorest countries.
- Bill Gates
These endless legal challenges that define elections in New York are a joke in this country, and they are the reason why it is so expensive, or one of the reasons, it’s so expensive to run here and why so many people decide not to run.
- Michael Bloomberg
Ethical decisions ensure that everyone’s best interests are protected. When in doubt, don’t.
- Harvey Mackay
Who am I winning for? Am I winning for Oracle shareholders or is it simply a matter of personal vanity? I’ll admit to it. Mea culpa. An awful lot of it is personal vanity.
- Larry Ellison
If you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. Write down your answers to these questions, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit – aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer.1. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.2. What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probably scenarios?4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?5. What are you putting off out of fear?6. What is it costing you – financially, emotionally, and physically – to postpone action?7. What are you waiting for?
- Timothy Ferriss
Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It’s something you have to learn. It’s a very lonely job.
- Ben Horowitz
By combining broadband Internet, phone and video services over a single cable line, we are taking a major step towards implementing future integrated data, voice and video telecommunications on a mass market scale.
- John Chambers
I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.
- Thomas Edison
Canoeing was hard and scary, and the wind could blow you across the lake if you did it wrong. After a year of not doing it right, I could talk to people and get them to sit up straight, take different kinds of chances, to breathe differently, to engage in the moment in the boat. And I changed them, and I changed me in the process.
- Seth Godin
Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
- Winston Churchill
I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone in my life. Now I tell people–don’t tell anyone your idea until you have invested enough of yourself in it that you are not going to turn back. When a person has an idea at that conception moment, it is the most vulnerable–one negative comment could knock you off course.
- Sara Blakely
The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
- Mark Zuckerberg
believe God is going before my child lining up the right people to come across his path, taking away the wrong people, breaking every force of darkness, opening his eyes to every deception, and giving him the wisdom to make good choices to fulfill his destiny.” The Scripture tells us that the people of Israel.
- Joel Olsteen
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
- Larry Ellison
Well, yes, I’ve fired a lot of people. Generally I like other people to fire, because it’s always a lousy task. But I have fired many people.
- Donald Trump
You must be the change to wish to see in the world.
- Mahatma Gandhi
In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.
- Sid Caesar
The ‘morality of compromise’ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.
- Andrew Carnegie
Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.
- Peter Thiel
The worst day of a man’s life is when he sits down and begins thinking about how he can get something for nothing.
- Thomas Jefferson
The ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
- Jack Welch
You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.
- Warren Buffett
I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention…. Its their ‘ideas’ that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor….’
- Thomas Edison
The U.S. is talking about keeping interest rates near zero.
- Lee Shau Kee
When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization.
- Peter Thiel
There are a thousand excuses for failure, but never a good reason.
- Mark Twain
We are seeing the beginning of things. Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second.
- Reed Hastings
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.
- Winston Churchill
In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Every one of my positions cuts – out half the country. I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gay rights, I’m pro-immigration, I’m against guns, I believe in Darwin.
- Michael Bloomberg
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
- Dale Carnegie
I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”
- Ben Horowitz
An organization takes its cue from the person on top. I always told our business leaders their personal intensity determined their organization’s intensity….For me intensityh covers a lot of sings. If there’s one characteristic all winners share, it’s that they care more than anyone else. No detail is too small to sweat or too large to dream. Over the years I have looked for this characteristic in the leaders we selected. It doesn’t mean loud or flamboyant. It’s something that comes from deep inside. Great organizations can ignite passion….Leaders must have courage to kick ass and break glass.
- Jack Welch
I’m enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that’s considered artistic, there’s a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can’t exist without it.
- Steve Martin
If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you maycome to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
- Winston Churchill
The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls looking like hard work.
- Thomas Edison
I like to look for patterns in science and life. It’s what I do.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.
- Jeff Bezos
What we know about the destination resort business is clearly established. But it’s all about one thing, and one thing only. All of the razzmatazz and jazz we hear about facilities and everything else doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s customer experience that determines the longevity and endurance of these enterprises.
- Stephen Wynn
Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.
- Russell Simmons
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
- Ben Horowitz
I bought a company in the mid-’90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I’ve made lots of dumb decisions. That’s part of the game.
- Warren Buffett
When the negative thoughts come – and they will, they come to all of us – it’s not enough to just not dwell on it… You’ve got to replace it with a positive thought.
- Joel Olsteen
We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.
- Walt Disney
I first thought maybe I’d do a banjo presentation record, where I’d play a couple of songs and get a bunch of other players to do the rest. Then I realized I had enough of my own songs to do an album of them.
- Steve Martin
Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.
- Rupert Murdoch
I really believed that fear is contagious.
- Joel Olsteen
Many people fail to make a favourable impression because they don’t listen attentively.
- Isaac F. Marcosson
I support health care for people. I want people well taken care of. But I also want health care that we can afford as a country. I have people and friends closing down their businesses because of Obamacare.
- Donald Trump
Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.
- Bill Gates
Success is doing what you want, where you want, when you want, with whom you want and as much as you want.
- Tony Robbins
The price of greatness is responsibility.
- Winston Churchill
I read the paper every day and the Bible every day, that way I know what both sides are up to.
- Zig Ziglar
Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.
- Walt Disney
You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.
- Zig Ziglar
People don’t want to embrace culture shifts because it’s not going to happen in the next 20 minutes.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Remain close to government and away from politics. It means deal more with the authorities. And less with individuals.
- Wang Jianlin
The possession of a perfect knowledge of your business is an absolute necessity in order to insure success.
- P.T. Barnum