Here are words that mean something to me.


Words by others that have inspired, encouraged and enlightened me. I've tried my best to attribute properly but drop me a line if I made any errors! In no particular order.

  • "Who is a mighty person? One who can control their emotions, and make of an enemy a friend."
    - Talmud

  • "Leader: a person who gets to make all the decisions that those not taking responsibility get to call wrong."
    - Chris Brady

  • "I’ve given nobody the authority over me to say I can’t do anything — I can do anything I want or can achieve. I don’t ask permission. I might ask forgiveness, but I won’t ask permission."
    - Quentin Tarantino

  • "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
    - Mark Twain

  • "There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity."
    - General Douglas MacAuthor

  • "The most important contribution any of us can make now is not to solve any particular problem, no matter how urgent energy or environment or financial regulation is. What we must do now is increase the proportion of humans who know that they can make change."
    - Bill Dryaton

  • "Never, ever, for the rest of your careers, hire someone who had a GPA of 4.0. Ever. Because the definition of a 4.0 is that this person buys the act; they don't screw around. Tommy Jefferson, Al Hamilton, and Georgie Washington, they were screwing around. This was a dinky doo-dippy country and they said, let's go after that George dude. Now that was not smart. If they had 4.0 grade point averages, they would not have started this revolution."
    - Tom Peters

  • "When you initiate new activities, find things you are currently doing that you can discontinue — whether reports, activities, etc. It works, but you must force yourself to do it. Always keep in mind your 'teeth-to-tail ratio."
    - Donald Rumsfeld

  • "Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified whishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown."
    - Ayn Rand

  • "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
    - Henry Ford

  • "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
    - Robert A. Heinlein

  • "There is only one definition. An entrepreneur is someone who gets something NEW done."
    - Peter Drucker

  • "To sustain an edge in any market you must make better products than your competitors, consistently, over and over and over again."
    - Fake Steve Jobs

  • "When the times comes to punish, we shall strike such a blow as’ll make their hearts faint and fearful. We share strike the strength out of ‘em. We shall leave them ruined and wasted, broken and shattered, torn in a thousand pieces and scattered to the four winds."
    - John Faa, King of the Gypsies (The Golden Compass)


  • "The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, 'Thus far and no farther' "
    - Ludwig van Beethoven

  • " In classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke,’ but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, ‘LET US MARCH.’ "
    - Adlai Stevenson

  • "Habitat has not chosen the easiest way to build houses. The easiest way is like the construction companies do it, with paid skilled labor and lots of it. Habitat does not work this way because the ultimate goal is not the house, but [to transform] the people who participate in the building of that house, the families who will live in that house, and the society that they are a part of."
    - Eric Duell, Habitat for Humanity Partner

  • "If you look at the people who have high impact, they have pretty general knowledge. They don’t have a really narrowly focused education."
    - Larry Page

  • "Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision."
    - Ayn Rand

  • "We shall not flag or fail. 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."
    - Winston Churchill

  • "Success is the power with which to acquire whatever one demands of life without violating the rights of others."
    - Andrew Carnegie

  • "Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life."
    - John Gardner

  • "Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes. We need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That’s my position. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet."
    - Sam Seaborn  - The West Wing

  • "Some people follow their dreams, others hunt them down and beat them into submission."
    - Neil Kendall

  • “ I don’t know what hand-wringing is"
    - Steve Jobs (rolling stones interview) - when asked whether he wrung his hands when deciding to bring iTunes to Windows

  • "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers."

    "We have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."

    - Barack Obama (Inaugural Address)

  • "To conquer oneself is a greater victory than to conquer thousands in a battle"
    - Buddha

  • It’s the red-hot performers the next level down that we have to watch like hawks. When they strike out, I offer this message: “There’s no one I want at bat besides you."
    William S. Thompson, Jr. - The Best Advice I Ever Got

  • "The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything."
    - Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. former CEO of IBM

  • "Act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly"
    - Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel

  • "One reason it can seem so hard to see how philosophy relates to life is that we have often already decided that philosophy is thinking, not living"
    - Kelly Jolley, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University