Quotations, by topic

• "Most jobs are marginally better than daytime TV." - Pastore's Truth

Endurance

• "Go the extra mile. It's never crowded." - Executive Speedwriter Newsletter



• "If you can"t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." - Harry S. Truman



• "People who want simple solutions are mediocre. The ability to endure with problems is the secret of greatness." - Armand Erpf

Enjoyment

• "The world is your playground. Why aren't you playing" - - Ellie Katz

Excitement

• "Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realise what"s wrong with it." - Anonymous

Experience

• "Just when you think you"ve graduated from the school of experience, someone thinks up a new course." - Mary H. Waldrip



• "Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes." - Woodrow Wilson



• "Experience is that marvellous thing that enables you to recognise a mistake when you make it again." - F.P. Jones

• "Sometimes the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason." - Jerry Seinfeld



• "In a time of rapid change, your experience can be your worst enemy." - J. Paul Getty

Facts

• "If facts conflict with theory, either change the theory or the facts." - Spinoza

Failure

• "Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently." - Henry Ford



• "It's not whether you get knocked down. It's whether you get up again." - Vince Lombardi



• "Failure to complete any task within the allotted time and budget proves the task was more difficult than expected and therefore requires promotions for those in charge." - Pratt's 2nd Rule



• "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." - Robert F. Kennedy



• "What can go wrong, will go wrong." - Murphy"s Law



• "No executive devotes time to proving himself wrong." - Anonymous

Fame

• "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." - Andy Warhol

Forgiveness

• "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission." - Law of Retroaction

Friendship

• "A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they're not so good, and sympathises with your problems when they're not so bad." - Arnold H. Glasgow



• "The most called-upon prerequisite of a friend is an accessible ear." - Maya Angelou

Future

• "My interest is in the future" because I'm going to spend the rest of my life there." - Charles Kettering

Genius

• "A genius is a talented person who does his homework." - Thomas Edison



• "Genius is ninety per cent perspiration and ten per cent inspiration." - Thomas Edison



• "In every work of genius we recognise our rejected thoughts." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Giving

• "The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose." - Hada Bejar



• "Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves." - James Matthew Barrie

Goals

• "Goals are dreams with deadlines." - Diana Scharf Hunt



• "If you don't know where you are going, you will end up somewhere else." - Peter's Principle of Management by Objectives

Greatness

• "A man should be greater than some of his parts." - Anonymous

Growth

• "We find comfort among those who agree with us " growth among those who don"t." - Frank A. Clark



• "Top cats often begin as underdogs." - Bernard Meltzer

Happiness

• "Happiness is a good health and a bad memory." - Ingrid Bergman



• "Start every day with a smile and get it over with." - W.C. Fields



• "Happiness is a very small desk and a very big wastebasket." - Robert Orben



• "Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realise they were the big things." - Robert Brault

Haste

• "When they want it bad, they get it bad." - Meskimen's 1st Law



• "You cannot produce a baby in one month by impregnating nine women." - Art Benjamin

Hope

• "Probably nothing in the world arouses more false hopes than the first four hours of a diet." - Dan Bennett

Humour

• "A clown is like an aspirin, only he works twice as fast." - Groucho Marx



• "Those who can't laugh at themselves leave the job to others." - Anonymous

Human Resources

• "Hire attitude. Teach skills." - Anonymous

• "The best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." - Theodore Roosevelt

• "So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work." - Peter Drucker

• "There are two kinds of people: those who do the work, and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there." - Indira Gandhi

• "Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you." - Warren Buffett

• "In the end we must have people to match our principles, not the reverse." - Warren Buffett

Imagination

• "Imagination is the true magic carpet." - Norman Vincent Peale



• "Anything you can imagine you can make real."- Jules Verne

Incompetence

• "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his/her level of incompetence." - The Peter Principle

Indulgence

• "Too much of a good thing is wonderful." - Mae West

Information

• "Information is a lot like liver and onions to a 6-year-old. The more you chew it, the bigger it gets." - John Malmo

Insurance

• "When the praying does no good, insurance does help." - Bertolt Brecht

Investment

• "October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February." - Mark Twain



• "Over a long weekend, I could teach my dog to be an investment banker." - Herbert A. Allen



• "I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in." - Anita Roddick

Knowledge

• "It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." - James Thurber

Meetings

• "A meeting is an event at which minutes are kept and hours are lost." - Anonymous

Life

• "Life is like riding a bicycle. You don"t fall off unless you stop pedalling." - Claude Pepper



• "There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Mohandas K. Gandhi

Leadership

• "I must go now, for there go my people, and I am their leader." - Mahatma Gandhi

Marketing

• "Marketing is far too important to leave to the marketing department." - David Packard

• "Just about every company thinks of itself as market oriented. It's confident it has the strength to compete with the wolf pack, but in reality it's often weak and tends to follow the shepherd." - Benson P. Shapiro

Memorandum

• "A memorandum is written not to inform the reader, but to protect the writer." - Anonymous

Memory

• "The moment may be temporary, but the memory is forever." - Bud Meyer



• "You never know when you're making a memory." - Rickie Lee Jones

Mistakes

• "Some people learn by the mistakes of others, but most of us are the others." - W.B. Prescott



• "People who are afraid to ask dumb questions are always surprised when they make dumb mistakes." - Sydney Harris

Mobile phones

• "The use of mobile phones in the restaurants seriously affects the level cooking of your pasta and pizzas." - Seen in a Lisbon restaurant, quoted in Time Out Guide to Lisbon

Motivation

• Speaking about one of his managers, Jack Byrne: "Byrne is like the chicken farmer who rolls an ostrich egg into the hen house and says, "Ladies, this is what the competition is doing." - - Warren Buffett

Needs

• "Spend sufficient time confirming the need, and the need will disappear." - Peter's Prognosis

Negotiation

• "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." - John F. Kennedy

Power

• "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." - John Lehman

Planning

• "A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than estimated. A carefully-planned project will take only twice as long." - Golub's Law



• "To estimate the time it takes to do a task, estimate the time you think it should take, multiply by two, and change the unit of measure to the next highest unit. Thus we allow two days for a one-hour task." - Westheimer's Rule

Procrastination

• "Today's greatest labour-saving device is tomorrow." - Tom Wilson



• "A good plan executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week." - George S. Patton

Professionalism

• "A professional is one who does a good job even when he doesn't feel like it." - Sammy Davis Jr.

Progress

• "I'm making progress if today's problems are different from yesterday's." - John Foster Dulles

Public Relations

• "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations writers." - Daniel J. Boorstin

Public speaking

• "People hear half of what you say, understand half of that, believe half of that, and remember half of that." - Anonymous

Reliability

• "Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done." - Gilb's 4th Law of Unreliability

Size

• "An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world." - Parkinson's Law of 1000