All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
- Mark Twain
Notable Quotables
There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.
- Bill Gates
I will study and prepare myself, and someday the opportunity will come.
- Abraham Lincoln
People are fond of using the its not what you know, its who you know adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense.
- Timothy Ferriss
Do all you can to make your dreams come true.
- Joel Olsteen
Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
- Thomas Edison
Why do I need succession planning? I’m very alert, I’m very vibrant. I have no intention to retire.
- Sheldon Adelson
Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
- Warren Buffett
1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
- Timothy Ferriss
Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.
- Reed Hastings
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture – I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
- Reid Hoffman
Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.
- Winston Churchill
One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace, good people don’t go into government.
- Donald Trump
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
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.
- Thomas Edison
The Real ReasonNew College Grads Can’t Get Hired shocked many when it reported, The Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College finds that more than 60% of employers say applicants lack communication and interpersonal skills
- Martha C. White
We, in short, propose to tax luxuries, monopolies, and superfluities, but we scrupulously avoid taxing the necessaries of life.
- Winston Churchill
Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
When your hobbies get in the way of your work – that’s OK, but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves… well.
- Steve Martin
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities – but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
- Winston Churchill
To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.
- Timothy Ferriss
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
- Winston Churchill
The world is facing a new networked, digital lifestyle, and we will ensure that Canon remains ahead of the game.
- Fujio Mitarai
This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.
- Winston Churchill
Effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information. Little is worse than a manager who can’t cut bait.
- Jack Welch
PR is gift-wrapping. If you package a bracelet in a Tiffany box, it will have a higher perceived value than if you presented it in a Kmart box.
- Michael Levine
Social entrepreneurs aim to combine the best of both worlds and “do well by doing good.” Usually they end up doing neither.
- Peter Thiel
Being great at everything is not an actionable message.
- Floris Maljers
You always have to give something when you get something.
- Jack Nadel
I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.
- Bill Gates
Skills are cheap. Passion is priceless.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
- Jeff Bezos
Opportunity does not knock, it presents itself when you beat down the door.
- Kyle Chandler
Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it.
- Rick Warren
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
- Warren Buffett
Creativity dies in an indisciplined environment.
- James C. Collins
The elevator to success is not running, you must climb the stairs.
- Zig Ziglar
Nine out of ten businesses fail, so I came up with a foolproof plan — create ten businesses.
- Robert Kiyosaki
No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle.
- Winston Churchill
Optimists are those who go after Moby dick in a row boat with a bucket of tarter sauce.
- Zig Ziglar
TECHNIQUES IN HANDLING PEOPLE Principle 1—Don’t criticize, condemn or complain. Principle 2—Give honest and sincere appreciation. Principle 3—Arouse in the other person an eager want.
- Dale Carnegie
Small businesses don’t exist without the nucleus.
- Bryan Smith
It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change – as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.
- Bill Gates
Every time I went on stage I was so terrified I almost threw up.
- Sara Blakely
Before success comes in any man’s life, he’s sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to quit. That’s exactly what the majority of men do.
- Napoleon Hill
You may not realize initially how many other opportunities are wrapped up inside the first one. After you go through the first door, you’ll then discover more doors automatically opening behind that one. One door leads you to another door, which leads to another door, and so one. It’s like ten other boxes packed inside one box. The initial door that God opens is your access to more opportunities. But you must be willing to walk through the first one to get to the other good things God has for you.
- George Foreman
We woke up one day, and all the sudden Starbucks was in the middle of this political crossfire between the people who want to bring a gun into Starbucks and the people who want to prevent it. It is a very difficult, fragile situation.
- Howard Schultz
As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t.
- Ben Horowitz
Relationships are leverage. If you give value to someone else first, you have leverage.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble
- Warren Buffett
We always try to look three to five years out in the decisions we make and there’s no question that the Cisco brand, our opportunity in the commercial market and the evolution of our leaders are going to take us to the next level.
- John Chambers
The more we share what’s happening around us, the more we understand how someone lives their life. The greater the understanding we have, the more empathy we have for each other. By and large, that reduces conflicts.
- Jack Dorsey
It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.
- Bill Gates
If you’re going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don’t work.
- Seth Godin
Don’t simply settle for what your parents had. You can go further than that. You can do more, have more, be more.
- Joel Olsteen
There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
- Jeff Bezos
You reinforce the behaviors that you reward, he explained. If you reward candor, you’ll get it.
- Jack Welch
A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.
- Rosalynn Carter
It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
- Winston Churchill
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
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
What goes on in Europe concerns us greatly because, if Europe comes apart, the E.U. comes apart, then you’re going to have enormous impact on America, that’s a very big trading partner of ours, and people own securities around the world in this day and age.
- Michael Bloomberg
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
- Bill Gates
Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today. Go another mile!
- Og Mandino
The future of America is not an entitlement. We have been given a treasure chest of gifts and opportunities, but some people are being left behind, and success is not sustainable unless it is shared.
- Howard Schultz
The missing ingredient for nearly all of the 1,000-plus clients I have worked with directly to improve their businesses is pigheaded discipline and determination. We all get good ideas at seminars and from books, radio talk shows and business-building gurus. The problem is that most companies do not know how to identify and adapt the best ideas to their businesses. Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success.
- Chet Holmes
Cisco Systems Capital will be investing in companies working on networking technology.
- John Chambers
At first, Uniqlo was a casual chain on the back streets of Hiroshima. Then… we became a national brand in Japan. So, the next step is to become a global brand.
- Tadashi Yanai
We have a mantra: don’t be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.
- Larry Page
We decided that instead of avoiding our competitors, or waiting for them to come to us, we would meet them head-on. It was one of the smartest strategic decisions we ever made. In fact, if our story doesn’t prove anything else about the free market system, it erases any doubt that spirited competition is good for business – not just for customers, but the companies which have to compete with one another too. Our competitors have honed and sharpened us to an edge we wouldn’t have with out them. We wouldn’t be nearly as good as we are today without Kmart, and I think they would admit we’ve made them a better retailer. One reason Sears fell so far off the pace is that they wouldn’t admit for the longest time that Wal-Mart and Kmart were their real competition. They ignored both of us, and we both blew right by them.
- Sam Walton
The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
It’s a great thing when you can show that you’ve been successful and that you’ve made a lot of money and that you’ve employed a lot of people.
- Donald Trump
If all we do with these tools is teach compliance and consumption, that’s all we’re going to get. School can and must do more than train the factory workers of tomorrow.
- Seth Godin
I think it’d be crazy not to have the plan encompass the entire reservoir. If we have (the smaller map), we’ve got a bunch of other folks telling us what they want to see happen in our community.
- Jack Taylor
Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you’re doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they’re hiding out in the comfortable zone. When your uncomfortable actions lead to success, the organization rewards you and brings you back for more.
- Seth Godin
Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.
- Warren Buffett
Always seek out the seed of triumph in every adversity.
- Og Mandino
I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.
- Thomas Edison
If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.
- Peter Thiel
I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.
- Sam Walton
Really, truly, try to figure out what your palate is all about. If you’ve determined that you don’t like dirty old stinky wine – old-world flavors – you probably like new-world fruit bombs. Stick to Shirazes and California Cabernets or Zinfandels.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
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
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
- Andrew Carnegie
In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away.
- Peter Thiel
The connected economy of ideas demands that we contribute initiative. And yet we resist, because our lizard brain, the one that lives in fear, relentlessly exaggerates the cost of being wrong.
- Seth Godin
Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.
- Richard Branson
The ultimate connection is when you are connected to the creator of the universe.
- Joel Olsteen
Speeches will not distribute the future.
- Jack Dorsey
Most poor people live in the poorest countries.
- Bill Gates
The legacy of Steve Jobs and the strength of Steve Jobs is that he established a company that’s clearly firing on all cylinders and clicking very well.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Love overlooks a person’s faults. That’s not always easy, but love believes the best in every person. Anybody can return evil for evil, but God wants His people to help heal wounded hearts.
- Joel Olsteen
Sam phoned to tell me he was going to start a wholesale club. It was no surprise. He is notorious for looking at what everybody else does, taking the best of it, and then making it better.
- Sol Price
Do extremely difficult work.That seems obvious, right? If you do something that’s valued but scarce because it’s difficult, you’re more likely to be in demand and to be compensated fairly for what you do.The implication is stunning, though: When designing a project or developing a skill, seek out the most difficult parts to master and contribute. If it’s easy, it’s not for you.
- Seth Godin
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater their power to harm us.
- Voltaire
Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.
- Elon Musk
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Here is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it could give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition. Deep in the nature of the men who had broken the King’s power was the conviction that law in his name was the sole foundation on which they could build.
- Winston Churchill
Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn’t claim to be a monopoly.
- Peter Thiel