May all of your creations have just the right flavor.
- Timothy Ferriss
Notable Quotables
Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.
- Jeff Bezos
We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and 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 beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the 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, will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.
- Winston Churchill
People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.
- Theodore Roosevelt
In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.
- Ben Horowitz
I think that God gives you your own will and choices. I don’t believe that we’re supposed to drag ourselves through life defeated and not see God’s blessings. But you have to make the right choices and follow that still, small voice within you. Because I think that’s how God leads us.
- Joel Olsteen
We will be one of the most productive residential developers in China in the next few years.
- Lee Shau Kee
People who enjoy what they are doing invariably do it well.
- Joe Gibbs
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
I had a terrible time hiring rich people. It sounds funny, but the problem is when things go wrong they can ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’ You don’t ever want anybody asking that question. You want them to say, ‘I know why I’m doing it, I need the money, let’s go’ or whatever it is that draws them.
- Ben Horowitz
Less than 3% of newly published authors make enough in royalties and advances to be happy to live on.
- Seth Godin
I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.
- Joel Olsteen
Plant a seed of greatness in your children. Speak a word of encourgement to someone who needs to hear it. Inspire someone to be a better person. One day you’ll reap a harvest, and your world will become a better place to live.
- George Foreman
I’m telling you, you can’t compare Saudi Arabia to other countries.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
[In January 2011] I think the important thing for Twitter is that it works on any technology.
- Jack Dorsey
Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.
- Peter Thiel
When an entrepreneur has an object in his line of vision, he should dismiss all other considerations from his mind, abandon all other activities, and charge directly at that object, continuing to charge until the object has been secured.
- Paul Johnson
My husband is such a healthy eater. Except when it comes to sweets. He never consumes anything except fruit until noon. And then from noon on he might have some brown rice and some tofu, and then, come eight or nine at night, he orders three mud-pie double-chocolate pieces of cake and eats all three of them.
- Sara Blakely
A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.
- Peter Thiel
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
- Jeff Bezos
Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.
- Phil Knight
Remember, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Luke… Luke… do not… do not underestimate the powers of the Emperor or suffer your father’s fate you will. Luke, when gone am I… the last of the Jedi will you be. Luke, the Force runs strong in your family. Pass on what you have learned, Luke. There is… another… Sky… walker.
- Yoda
The best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.
- Peter Drucker
What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.
- Ralph Lauren
We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.
- Steve Ballmer
Leadership is hard to train on.
- Ben Horowitz
It is simply service that measures success.
- George Washington Carver
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
- Ben Horowitz
I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.
- Joel Olsteen
The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
You need to be better not bitter.
- Nate Waters
Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.
- Winston Churchill
The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.
- Winston Churchill
Before I left China, I was educated that China was the richest, happiest country in the world. So when I arrived Australia, I thought, ‘Oh my God, everything is different from what I was told.’ Since then, I started to think differently.
- Jack Ma
Put all excuses aside and remember this: YOU are capable.
- Zig Ziglar
Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer.
- Seth Godin
Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.
- Napoleon Hill
Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.
- John C. Maxwell
Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.
- Ray Kroc
I am a man who has always needed heros.
- Phil Knight
Bolsheviks create their own difficulties which they successfully overcame later.
- Winston Churchill
Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.
- Jack Welch
Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.
- James C. Collins
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
- Timothy Ferriss
BLAMING IDIOTS FOR interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children—they can’t help it. It’s their nature. Then again, I had (who am I kidding—and have), on occasion, been known to create interruptions out of thin air. If you’re anything like me, that makes us both occasional idiots. Learn to recognize and fight the interruption impulse. This is infinitely easier when you have a set of rules, responses, and routines to follow.
- Timothy Ferriss
Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.
- John C. Maxwell
Life really happens at intersections.
- Jack Dorsey
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
- Winston Churchill
The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?
- Dale Carnegie
The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.
- P.T. Barnum
It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
- Warren Buffett
One of the talents of the [late] great Steve Jobs is that he [knew] how to design Medusa-like products. While every Macintosh model has had flaws (some more than others), most of them have has a sexiness and a design sensibility that has turned many consumers into instant converts. Macintosh owners upgrade far more often than most computer users for precisely this reason.
- Seth Godin
Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.
- Thomas Edison
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
- John Wooden
There is no sale without the story, no knockout without the setup.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Success occurs when opportunity meets preparation.
- Zig Ziglar
Keep thy heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life’ (Prov. 4:23 KJV).
- Joel Olsteen
I’ve done a number of Super Bowl ads. And that is the best advertising of the year. That is when people realize they’re going to be compared directly against other ads.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more.
- Sam Walton
I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating – is this the exact right mix? I think that’s – to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense.
- Jerry Seinfeld
When those in power use shame to bully the weak into compliance, they are stealing from us. They tell us that they will expose our secrets (not good enough, not hardworking enough, not from the right family, made a huge mistake once) and will use the truth to exile us from our tribe. This shame, the shame that lives deep within each of us, is used as a threat. And when those in power use it, they take away part of our humanity.
- Seth Godin
A movement is thrilling. It’s the work of many people, all connected, all seeking something better.
- Seth Godin
In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.
- Bill Gates
The first three-and-a-half months of calendar year 2001 have been extremely challenging for many of us in high-tech.
- John Chambers
I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.
- Jeff Bezos
CNN is pretty consistently on the left, if you look at their choice of stories, what they play up. It’s not what they say. It’s what they highlight.
- Rupert Murdoch
It’s OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don’t want them to catch up because we’re slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.
- Bill Gates
It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.
- Joel Olsteen
Doing the wrong thing daily, compounds over time.
- John C. Maxwell
China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.
- Bill Gates
The market’s going to move with tremendous speed. If there is such a thing as a killer app, video is it.
- John Chambers
I’m not a businessman — I’m a business, man.
- Jay-Z
A man has no right to occupy another man’s time unnecessarily.
- John D. Rockefeller
I’ve taken those pharmacists and asked them to reach out to doctors. Doctors still misprescribe very often. They leave gaps with care. People with asthma, they don’t take their inhalers, they wait until they’re sick, and by then, it’s too late. Now we’re already running up the bills and going to emergency rooms. We’re using our pharmacist to do the things they were educated to do, not to count pills. That’s not where the value is.
- George Paz
The point is that you can’t be too greedy.
- Donald Trump
There would be no advantage to be gained by sowing a field of wheat if the harvest did not return more than was sown.
- Napoleon Hill
[On Howard White] Rather than say to young people that they should have a goal and focus on it, he reverses it: ‘Any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going.’ Most often, on reflection, you will grow to understand that what had passed for a funny commnet of the moment has a good deal of wisdom behind it.
- Phil Knight
In the next two to three years there will probably be only three to five players in this area. The chances to gain or lose market share are exciting.
- John Chambers
I thought Microsoft did a lot of things that were good and right building parts of the browser into the operating system. Then I thought it out and came up with reasons why it was a monopoly.
- Steve Wozniak
With the attention I got on my wealth, I thought I would have become a source of resentment, but it is just the other way around – it just generates that much more ambition in many people.
- Azim Premji
Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.
- Charles Ergen
A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate.
- Donald Trump
If the United States wants access to Chinese, Indian or Vietnamese markets, we must get access to theirs. U.S. protectionism is very subtle but it is very much there.
- Azim Premji
Husbands and wives, have fun with each other. I’m convinced it makes all the difference in the world.
- Zig Ziglar
Our job as founders as entrepreneurs is to distribute the future that’s already here.
- Jack Dorsey
Focus on being productive instead of busy.
- Timothy Ferriss
People who build family businesses are not classically trained. They have to deal with an enormous amount of politics. You think corporate politics are tough? Go work for your dad or your mom.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
They (the competition) need to avoid coming at us head-on, and do their own thing better than we do ours. It doesn’t make any sense to try to underprice Wal-Mart (DJC) on something like toothpaste (DJ Prices). That’s not what the customer is looking to a small store for anyway. Most independents are best off, I think, doing what I prided myself on doing for many years as a storekeeper, getting out on the floor and meeting everyone of the customers. Let them know how much you appreciate them, and ring that cash register yourself. That little personal touch is so important for an independent merchant because no matter how hard Wal-Mart tries to duplicate – and we try awfully hard – we can’t really do it.
- Sam Walton
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.
- Winston Churchill
I cut the feet out of my control top pantyhose to wear under these white pants and that was the ah-ha moment that started Spanx. My own butt was my own inspiration!
- Sara Blakely
She said, ‘My family is OK, John, but we lost everything.
- John Chambers
You can’t build any kind of organization if you’re not going to surround yourself with people who have experience and skill base beyond your own.
- Howard Schultz
The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things.
- Ben Horowitz
People were expecting Rouge to go bankrupt, so there was a lot of anxiety. The corporate culture problem was even worse than in Russia. And at the same time, the work rules were more difficult.
- Alexei Mordashov
I have never found a ship I wanted to go down with
- Jack Nadel
Young men starting in life should avoid running into debt. There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt. It is a slavish position to get ill, yet we find many a young man, hardly out of his “teens,” running in debt. He meets a chum and says, “Look at this: I have got trusted for a new suit of clothes.” He seems to look upon the clothes as so much given to him; well, it frequently is so, but, if he succeeds in paying and then gets trusted again, he is adopting a habit which will keep him in poverty through life. Debt robs a man of his self-respect, and makes him almost despise himself.
- P.T. Barnum
You do not lead by hitting people over the head. That’s assault, not leadership.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If it didn’t happen in your life before, then you’re not paying attention you don’t think it’s possible. But almost all important events never happen in your life before.
- Ray Dalio
If you complain you will remain, if you praise you will be raised.
- Joel Olsteen