Anyone who knows me knows that I am slavishly devoted to memorable quotes. Maybe because they say a lot in a brief moment. I suspect that they touch all the bases in the Made to Stick formula of SUCCES: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories. Like the blogs, they always educate, often amuse, occasionally inspire. Do you have memorable quotes that you like? Let me know.
I have been accused of having some memorable quotes of my own, but I'd rather shine a light on the quotes of others. Enjoy.
“The reasonable man
adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying
to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the
unreasonable man.” --
George Bernard Shaw
"You can't get so far ahead of
the parade that no one knows you're in it." - John Naisbitt
“The odds of a plaintiff's lawyer winning in civil court are two to one
against. Think about that for a second. Your odds of surviving a game of
Russian roulette are better than winning a case at trial. 12 times
better. So why does anyone do it? They don't. They settle. Out of the
780,000 suits filed, only 12,000 or 1½% ever reach a verdict. The whole
idea of lawsuits is to settle, to compel the other side to settle. And
you do that by spending more money than you should, which forces them to
spend more money than they should, and whoever comes to their senses
first… loses.”
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job
depends on not understanding it.”
-- Upton Sinclair
”If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples,
then you and I will still each have one apple.
But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these
ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
-- George Bernard Shaw
“It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the
best, you very often get it.” --
"Whether
you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right." –
Henry Ford
“The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian
buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.” --
George F. Kennan
“We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must
deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.” -- Harry
Truman
“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s
inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” -- Reinhold
Niebuhr
“In a digital world, the gift I give you almost always benefits me more
than it costs.” – Seth Godin
“More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue. We’ve become slaves to
our mobile devices and the glow of our screens. It used to be much more
simple and, somewhere, simple turned into slow.” – Howard Mann
“When times are tough, vision is the first causality. Before conditions
can improve, it is the first thing we must recover.” – Michael
Hyatt
“The
best time to plant a
tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” – John
Wood
“Change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk
of change.” – Alan Webber
“Management isn’t natural…it
doesn’t emanate from nature.
Management isn’t a tree or a river… Somebody invented it. And over
time, most inventions – from the candle to the cotton gin to the compact
disc – lose their usefulness.” – Daniel Pink
“The problem is that you can't have good ideas unless you're willing to
generate a lot of bad ones.” – Seth Godin
“People are NOT your greatest asset, the RIGHT people are.” --
Jim Collins
“Most companies do not have a management advantage." -- Gary
Hamel
“Every organization must be prepared to
abandon everything it does to survive in the future.”
— Peter Drucker
“Everyone thinks of changing the world,
but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy
“If things were simple, word would have
gotten around.” – Jacques Derrida
"We are the 10th-largest brewer in the
[When the Dodgers returned to
“I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I
know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.” –
Paul McCartney
"Today, people are asking, 'Is the crisis over? Is the economy
coming back?' My reply is, 'No, the economy is not coming back. The
economy has moved on, and the people asking if it's coming back are
being left behind.'" --
Robert Kiyosaki
“The trick to doing well with these things is to be in a
place where people are saying, Hey, that's a crazy idea. If you're
right, there's the opportunity to produce something really big. You want
to be one to three years early. You want to start before others think
it's an easy idea. It's much harder to be successful when 10 similar
things are all being financed.”
--Reid Hoffman
“Everything
that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts
cannot necessarily be counted.” - Albert Einstein
"Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It is time to start
thinking." -- Sir Ernest Rutherford
“Every night I would take home a different software manual, and I would read them... Peachtree, PFS, DBase, Lotus, Accpac… I couldn’t put them down. Every night I would read some after getting home, no matter how late. It worked. Turns out not a lot of people ever bothered to RTFM (read the frickin’ manual), so people started thinking I really knew my stuff.” -- Mark Cuban
“You should never underestimate the predictability of stupidity.” --
Bullet Tooth Tony,
Snatch, 2000
“Progress is only possible if we reverse the industrial
revolution.” --
Michael Hammer
“History can definitely
repeat itself if everyone concentrates very hard on making the same
stupid mistakes. And yet,
something draws us back to the familiar, because even if the familiar is
not so good, it is familiar.”
-- Nelson DeMille
“People
change and forget to tell one another.”
- Lillian Hellman
A company president
admitted, “I’d like to get a firm grasp on reality, but somebody keeps
moving it.”
“Win/win translates
to: I win. I win again.” – Susan Scott
“Differences of opinion
lead to raised voices and strong emotions, after which someone dies.“ –
Susan Scott
“Nothing
is more dangerous than an idea, when it’s the only one you have.”
— Émile Chartier
“In
any situation, the person who can most accurately describe reality
without laying blame will emerge as the leader, whether designated or
not.” -- Edwin
Friedman
“Out beyond ideas of
wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
-- Rumi
“I
have not yet witnessed a spontaneous recovery from incompetence.”
-- Susan Scott
“If you want to see someone in real pain, watch someone who knows who he is and defaults on it on a regular basis.” -- Pat Murray
“We are out there on
the cutting edge of the uncontroversial.”
-- Martin Amis
“The
experience of being understood, versus interpreted, is so compelling,
you can charge admission.”
-- B. Joseph Pine II,
The Experience Economy
“If you have a 150 I.Q., sell 30
points to someone else. You need to be smart, but not a genius.”
-- Warren Buffet
“Some of the worst
business decisions I’ve ever seen are those with future projections and
discounts back. It seems like the higher mathematics with more false
precision should help you, but it doesn’t. They teach that in business
schools because, well, they’ve got to do something.” -- Charlie
Munger,
“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work - he is the purpose of it.
We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a
favor by giving us the opportunity to serve him.”
-- Mahatma Gandhi
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.” -- Aldous Huxley
“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” --
John F. Kennedy
“She who has the shortest
to-do list wins.” – Susan Scott
“The problem named is the problem solved.” — Pat Murray
“What
information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its
recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of
attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
-- Economist Herbert Simon, 1971
“Since
every interruption costs around 25 minutes of productivity, we spend
nearly a third of our day recovering from them.“ -- Linda Stone,
who coined the phrase continuous
partial attention
“My
experience is what I agree to attend to.” -- William James
“Priorities are like arms: If you have more than two of them,
they’re probably make-believe” – Lifehacker Merlin Mann
“My wife reminds me sometimes: ‘You have all the information you
need to do something right now.’ ”
-- Merlin Mann
“There’s
no shell script, there’s no fancy pen, there’s no notebook or nap or
Firefox extension or hack that’s gonna help you figure out why the fuck
you’re here.
That’s on you. This makes me sound like one of those people who swindled
the Beatles, but if you are having attention problems, the best way to
deal with it is by admitting it and then saying, ‘From now on, I’m gonna
be in the moment and more cognizant.’ I said not long ago, I think on
Twitter—God, I quote myself a lot, what an asshole—that really all
self-help is Buddhism with a service mark.”
-- Merlin Mann
“Where
you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human
being than anything that you put in your mission statement.”
-- Merlin Mann
"Do
what you can, with what you have, where you are."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
“Before
coming to the Yankees, every fifth day I expected to pitch.
When I came to the Yankees, every fifth day I expected to win.”
-- David Wells
“If
it was any other team, you would have to consider it luck.” – Cornell
Lacrosse coach Jeff Tambroni, on losing a 3-goal lead
with 4 minutes remaining and seeing National Champion Syracuse
University tie the game with 4.5 seconds remaining in regulation, and
then winning at 1:20 into sudden-death overtime
“For
some people, thinking is
merely rearranging their prejudices.”
-- William James
"Truth
arises from disagreement amongst friends.”
-- David Hume
“Everybody
wants to be on a championship team…. nobody wants to come to practice.”
– Bob Knight
“(My
son) is the reason why some animals in the wild eat their young at
birth.” – Bob Knight
“Mental
toughness is to physical as four is to one.” – Bob Knight
“The will to succeed is important, but what's more important
is the will to prepare.” – Bob Knight
“Emotions serve as the gasoline that propels us into action.”
– Susan Scott
“One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.”
-- Rita Mae Brown
“Good judgment comes from experience.
And experience comes from having made bad judgments.”
-- Abraham Lincoln
“Every
success has a price, and it is paid up front.” -- HL Hunt