Quotes

“Every day spent in China’s startup scene is a trial by fire, like a day spent as a gladiator in the Coliseum .. If one’s only edge is a single novel idea, that idea will invariably be copied, your key employees will be poached, and you’ll be driven out of business by VC-subsidized competitors.”
— Kai-Fu Lee

“If you aren’t embarrassed by what [product] you launch with, you waited too long to launch.”
— Paul Graham

“From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes. You should be yourself. But you should understand what that means. Unless you are perfect, it does not mean don’t make any changes. In a certain sense, you should not be yourself. You should try to become something better.”
— Chief Justice John Roberts

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strive valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“Train people well enough so they can leave; treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”
— Richard Branson

“I fish only for edible fish, and hunt only for edible game, even in the laboratory.”
–Willis Carrier, inventor of air conditioning

“Sometimes you hear people say, ‘When I’m at work, I do my work. But when I leave work, I don’t think about it at all.’ This type of person has a limited future in whatever he’s doing. A person who does not think about his work when he is away from it is a person who is not suited to that line of work. If you are doing the right thing for you, your work and your personal life are interwoven, with only a thin dividing line between the two.”
–Brian Tracy

“As young men, they had been pretty much alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate. But the drama demanded that the pirate half of Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe wither away.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

“All men dream, but not equally. Those that dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
— T.E. Lawrence