Last on Earth - Topic I

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Famous Speeches         All Topics Fill-In Quotations
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  I Am (2)
I will undoubtedly have to seek what is happily known as gainful employment, which I am glad to say does not describe holding public office.
Dean Acheson

You can take it for granted that I am not going to waste any time thinking about giving up how happy I am at Borussia, in the city of Dortmund, and with this team.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang

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  I Believe (1)
Do I believe in giving up? No, I don't.
David Boreanaz

  Idea (31)
Our struggle was political, ideological and economic, and we felt we couldn't make something of ourselves unless we bettered society. We saw the two together.
Bella Abzug

A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one.
Mary Kay Ash

In a restless, creative business with an emphasis on experiment and development, ideas are the lifeblood.
Richard Branson

Ideas are a commodity. Execution of them is not.
Michael Dell

Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaption to the problem you're working on.
Thomas Edison

I find that no matter how long a meeting goes on, the best ideas always come during the final five minutes, when people drop their guard and I ask them what they really think.
Michael Eisner

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

In a good meeting there is a momentum that comes from the spontaneous exchange of fresh ideas and produces extraordinary results. That momentum depends on the freedom permitted the participants.
Harold Geneen

Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea.
Doug Hall

Globalization means we have to re-examine some of our ideas, and look at ideas from other countries, from other cultures, and open ourselves to them. And that's not comfortable for the average person.
Herbie Hancock

Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding, Joseph exclaimed. If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?

The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.
The Glass Bead Game
Hermann Hesse

To stay ahead, you must have your next idea waiting in the wings.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter

The purpose of a university is to make students safe for ideas - not ideas safe for students.
Clark Kerr

True creativity often starts where language ends.
Arthur Koestler

A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words to action.
Theodore Levitt

Creativity is thinking new things. Innovation is doing new things.
Theodore Levitt

Libraries were full of ideas-perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.
Throne of Glass
Sarah J. Maas

If new ideas are the lifeblood of any thriving organization ... managers must learn to revere, not merely tolerate, the people who come up with the ideas.
Mark McCormack

The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.
Nicholas Negroponte

I love the idea of giving up the vengeful nature that so many of us have.
Mandy Patinkin

Acting isn't always about the amount of talent you have, or your ability to cry on command. The point is, how well can you take direction? How well can you put aside your own ideas or ego and listen to the ideas of the director and the people above you, while not giving up the passion and drive of that character?
Shannon Purser

Three components make an entrepreneur: the person, the idea and the resources to make it happen.
Anita Roddick

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.
Eleanor Roosevelt

They say there's no second act in American lives. There's something there worth exploring. Giving up an idea of yourself, examining your failure, and seeing if that failure was the system's or yours. What does it mean to not turn out to be the person you want to be?
Scott Rudin

Money isn't what motivates entrepreneurs; it is acknowledgement - a craving for your ideas to be acknowledged.
Reuben Singh

Intelligence becomes an asset when some useful order is created out of free-floating brainpower.
Thomas A. Stewart

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Albert Szent-Györgyi

The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas. Tolerant like the sky, all-pervading like sunlight, firm like a mountain, supple like a tree in the wind, he has no destination in view and makes use of anything life happens to bring his way.
Lao Tzu

The point of work-out is to give people better jobs. When people see that their ideas count, their dignity is raised. Instead of feeling numb, like robots, they feel important.
Jack Welch

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
Alfred North Whitehead

Sometimes the first step is the hardest: coming up with an idea. Coming up with an idea should be like sitting on a pin - it should make you jump up and do something.
Kemmons Wilson

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  Ideal (1)
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make a better soup.
H. L. Mencken

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  Identity (3)
The theme of Death is to Poetry what Mistaken Identity is to Drama.
Dannie Abse

I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee.
Bella Abzug

I was sure we would never see the adoption of the Euro. Countries giving up their currencies for a common tender was, it seemed to me, completely out of tune with currency being a carrier of people's cultural identity, celebrating national heroes and events, as it had been for hundreds of years.
John Naisbitt

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  Idle (4)
Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness - its opposite - never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.
Cervantes

I make no secret of the fact that I would rather lie on a sofa than sweep beneath it. But you have to be efficient if you're going to be lazy.
Shirley Conran

It is possible for a business venture to be an island of efficiency in a sea of sloth.
Indira Gandhi

Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.
Benjamin Jowett

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  Ignorance (3)
Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
Graham Greene

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
Thomas Huxley

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Oscar Wilde

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  Illness (10)
Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their Fees,
There is no cure for this disease.

Hilaire Belloc

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
Thomas Carlyle

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.
Henry Ford

For extreme illnesses, extreme treatments are most fitting.
Hippocrates

Life is a series of baby steps along the way and if you add up these tiny little steps you take toward your goal, whatever it is, whether it's giving up something, a terrible addiction or trying to work your way through an illness. When you total up those baby steps you'd be amazed over the course of 10 years, the strides you've taken.
Hoda Kotb

Nearly all men die of their medicines, and not of their illnesses.
Molière

Cured yesterday of my disease. I died last night of the physician.
Mathew Prior

One evil in old age is that as your time is come you think every little illness is the beginning of the end. When a man expects to be arrested every knock at the door is an alarm.
Sydney Smith

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire

I only care to see doctors when I am in perfect health; then they comfort one, but when one is ill they are most depressing.
Oscar Wilde

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  Imagine (19)
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
Thomas Edison

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
Albert Einstein

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like maybe we should be just friends turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
The Kindly Ones
Neil Gaiman

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Langston Hughes

The moment a person forms a theory his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favour that theory.
Thomas Jefferson

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
Joseph Joubert

We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.
Helen Keller

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
Henry Miller

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

John Milton

Organizations with decision-making speed and imagination will thrive as nobody can claim to have a monopoly over creativity.
Narayana Murthy

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Edgar Allan Poe

You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream ...
All that you see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
Dr. Seuss

I dream for a living.
Steven Spielberg

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard

If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.
William Arthur Ward

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  Imitate (5)
Copying other organizations' activities sounds like industrial espionage to some people, but the truth is that benchmarking is perfectly legal and ethical.
Warren Bennis

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.
Joyce Brothers

Imitation lies at the root of most human actions. A respectable person is one who conforms to custom. People are called good when they do as others do.
Anatole France

Fashion is something barbarous for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde

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  Immortal (3)
If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.
Norman Cousins

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Between us, love the buses at the door the long glass street two years, my death to yours my death upon your lips my face becoming glass strong challenged time making me win immortal our street our river a deadly glass to hold. Now they are feeding me into a steel mill furnace O love the stream of glass a stream of living fire.
The Book of the Dead
Muriel Rukeyser

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  Important (2)
The manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.
Dean Acheson

The most important aspect of the relationship between the president and the secretary of state is that they both understand who is president.
Dean Acheson

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  Impossible (10)
To accuse is so easy that it is infamous to do so where proof is impossible.
Zoë Akins

It's fun to do things that people don't think are possible or likely.
Michael Dell

It is impossible to place all the world and one's father.
Jean de La Fontaine

It is practically impossible for a top management man, or even middle management, to be doing the degree and level of work that he should be doing and, at the same time, have a clean desk.
Harold Geneen

Everything is always impossible before it works. That is what entrepreneurs are all about - doing what people have told them is impossible.
R. Hunt Greene

Sincerity is impossible unless it pervades the whole being, and the pretense of it saps the very foundation of character.
James Russell Lowell

It is not impossibilities which fill us with deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize.
Robert Mallet

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
Shimon Peres

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
George Santayana

Leadership is the process of achieving a dream together, especially when that dream seems impossible to achieve.
Stan Shih

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  Incentive (1)
I can charge a man's battery and then recharge it again. But it is only when he has his own generator that we can talk about motivation. He then needs no outside stimulation. He wants to do it.
Frederick Herzberg

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  Independent (8)
Never sing in chorus, if you want to be heard.
J. F. Archibald

The one thing computers have done is let us make bigger mistakes. We have to be careful not to depend on our machines.
Michael Bloomberg

Those who won our independence ... believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
Louis Brandeis

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Thomas Jefferson

We sometimes take for granted the freedom and power of independent thought and action. And only after it's been compromised, do we fully realize how fundamental it is to the pursuit of economic opportunity.
Arthur Levitt

If we take the term in the strict sense, there never has been a real democracy, and there never will be. It is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

One of the things that my parents have taught me is never listen to other people's expectations. You should live your own life and live up to your own expectations, and those are the only things I really care about.
Tiger Woods

A land without a people for a people without a land.
Israel Zangwill

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  Indispensable (2)
Some time when you're feeling important
Some time when your ego's in bloom
Some time when you feel you are
The best qualified man in the room,
Some time when you feel that your going
Would leave an unfillable hole,
Just follow this simple instruction
And see how it humbles the soul.
Take a bucket and fill it with water
Place your hands in it up to your wrists
Take them out and the hole that remains
Is a measure of how you'll be missed.
You may splash all you like as they enter
You may stir up the water galore
But take them out and in just a moment
It will look just the same as before.
The moral of this is quite simple
Just do the best that you can.
Be proud of yourself but remember
There is no indispensable man.

Cassell's Humorous Quotations
Anonymous

So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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  Infamous (1)
To accuse is so easy that it is infamous to do so where proof is impossible.
Zoë Akins

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  Inferior (1)
The superior man is easy to serve, but difficult to please ... The inferior man is difficult to serve, but easy to please.
Confucius

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  Infinite (5)
The sinews of war: unlimited money.
Cicero

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
Albert Einstein

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.
Albert Einstein

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Mahatma Gandhi

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
Elbert Hubbard

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  Information (8)
The attitude of disrespect that many executives have today for accurate reporting is a business disgrace. And auditors ... have done little on the positive side. Though auditors should regard the investing public as their client, they tend to kowtow instead to the managers who choose them and dole out their pay.
Warren Buffett

The thing that best defines a child is the total inability to receive information from anything not plugged in.
Bill Cosby

At office-managerial level ... you do not read more than the first two sentences of any given report. You believe that anything which cannot be put into two sentences is not worth attending to.
Penelope Fitzgerald

Some marry the first information they receive, and turn what comes later into their concubine. Since deceit is always first to arrive, there is no room left for truth.
Baltasar Gracián

Most of the information we use now is obtained free ... and there is no way of knowing anymore whether the information on which we base our own information for distribution is true or false. But that doesn't seem to matter; all that matters is that the information comes from a reputable source.
Joseph Heller

It was a phenomenon I noticed many years ago. Young people were just giving up every bit of information about themselves they could.
Rush Limbaugh

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Information is like an oyster. It has its greatest value when it is fresh.
Carl Shapiro

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  Inherit (2)
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer

What if the child inherits my beauty and your brains?
George Bernard Shaw

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  Initiate (3)
It's fun to do things that people don't think are possible or likely.
Michael Dell

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.
Demosthenes

Companies that stay ahead of change are ones in which their people see change as something they themselves accomplish and not something that is imposed on them. They see lots of opportunities to take initiative.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter

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  Innovate (21)
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams

Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.*
*Attribution questionable.
Scott Adams

Doing the things we do now and doing them better, cheaper and faster will take us so far. But it will not take us far enough. We're going to have to do new things in new ways.
Peter Bonfield

Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics.
Coco Chanel

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
John Cleese

Minds are like parachutes: they only function when they are open.
James Dewar

Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children and cut their own fingers.
Arthur Eddington

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Thomas Edison

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
Thomas Edison

The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.
Albert Einstein

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something ... That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.
Steve Jobs

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Jung

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
John F. Kennedy

A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words to action.
Theodore Levitt

Creativity is thinking new things. Innovation is doing new things.
Theodore Levitt

Organizations with decision-making speed and imagination will thrive as nobody can claim to have a monopoly over creativity.
Narayana Murthy

The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.
Nicholas Negroponte

If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.
David Ogilvy

Fashion is something barbarous for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Albert Szent-Györgyi

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
Alfred North Whitehead

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  Insanity (1)
Insanity is hereditary; you can get it from your children.
Sam Levenson

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  Inside (1)
Every glass thermometer has subtle variations in the size and shape of the bulb at the bottom and the capillary tube inside, as well as variations in the width of gradations on the side. The compounded effect of these uncertainties is that each thermometer reads temperature slightly differently.
Sam Kean

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  Inspirational (6)
People will forget what you said
Poeple will forget what you did
But people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
John Constable

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein

For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it. For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it.
Ivan Panin

The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas. Tolerant like the sky, all-pervading like sunlight, firm like a mountain, supple like a tree in the wind, he has no destination in view and makes use of anything life happens to bring his way.
Lao Tzu

The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H. G. Wells

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  Instinct (1)
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Jung

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  Integrity (4)
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Lillian Hellman

If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Abraham Lincoln

Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.
Theodore Roosevelt

The depths and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.
Leon Trotsky

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  Intellect (1)
For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move.
Edward T. Hall

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  Intention (2)
If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards.
John Henry Newman

No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions. He had money as well.
Margaret Thatcher

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  Internet (2)
Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.
Jimmy Carter

Most canele recipes begin with an instruction to brush $30 copper molds with melted beeswax. Unsurprisingly, I've never made it past the Internet search for used canele molds before giving up.
Samir Nosrat

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  Intuition (5)
Start with your own money and value your intuition. It's all about endurance in the beginning. Your dream and passion to succeed must be stronger than your fear of failure.
Terri Bowersock

The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.
Albert Einstein

When it's time to make a decision about a person or problem ... trust your intuition ... act.
Bud Hadfield

One of our greatest gifts is our intuition. It is a sixth sense we all have - we just need to learn to tap into and trust it.
Donna Karan

To run this business ... you need ... optimism, humanism, enthusiasm, intuition, curiosity, love, humour, magic and fun, and that secret ingredient - euphoria.
Anita Roddick

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  Invest (1)
Never speculate ... if you have savings, invest them in solid securities, lands, or property. The man who gambles upon the exchanges is in the condition of the man who gambles at the gaming table. He rarely, if ever, makes a permanent success.
Andrew Carnegie