people Quotes “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” ― Bill Gates “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.” ― Bill Gates “If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.” ― Bill Gates “I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.” ― Bill Gates “Some people may call me a nerd. I claim the label with pride.” ― Bill Gates “So it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts -- you know, they, they kill children. It's a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.” ― Bill Gates “I believe that if you show people the problems and you show Them The Solutions They Will Be Moved To Act” ― Bill Gates “There’s one last way we can cut down on emissions from the food we eat: by wasting less of it. In Europe, industrialized parts of Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, more than 20 percent of food is simply thrown away, allowed to rot, or otherwise wasted. In the United States, it’s 40 percent. That’s bad for people who don’t have enough to eat, bad for the economy, and bad for the climate. When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.” ― Bill Gates “Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation.” ― Bill Gates “But giving people more information can help them make better choices.” ― Bill Gates “People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.” ― Jeff Bezos “I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.” ― Jeff Bezos “People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.” ― Jeff Bezos “When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.” ― Jeff Bezos “Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.” ― Jeff Bezos “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” ― Jeff Bezos “If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people… Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue” ― Jeff Bezos “Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.” ― Jeff Bezos “I'd rather interview fifty people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.” ― Jeff Bezos “It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that” ― Jeff Bezos “People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday's 'wow' quickly becomes today's 'ordinary'.” ― Jeff Bezos “Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” ― Jeff Bezos “More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet.” ― Jeff Bezos “I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.” ― Elon Musk “It is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.” ― Elon Musk “Don't confuse schooling with education. I didn't go to Harvard but the people that work for me did.” ― Elon Musk “I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.” ― Elon Musk “At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.” ― Elon Musk “If you punish people too much for failure, then they will respond accordingly and the innovation you will get will be very incrementalist. Nobody's going to try anything bold for fear of getting fired or punished in some way. The risk/reward must be balanced, in favor of making bold moves.” ― Elon Musk “Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication […] No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.” ― Elon Musk “I mean, I think that if people are concerned about volatility, they should definitely not buy our stock. I’m not here [on an earnings call] to convince you to buy [Tesla] stock. Do not buy it if volatility is scary. There you go.” ― Elon Musk “Many people will panic to find a charger before their phone dies. But won't panic to find a plan before their dreams dies.” ― Elon Musk “To anyone I’ve offended I just wanna say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship…Did you also think I was gonna be a chill normal dude?” ― Elon Musk “If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion. There’s certain special skills, especially in advanced engineering, that are the limiting factor in creating new companies; we send these people home after training them in our graduate schools.” ― Elon Musk “Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don't expect it from cheap people.” ― Warren Buffett “Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.” ― Warren Buffett “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.” ― Warren Buffett “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” ― Warren Buffett “It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.” ― Warren Buffett “In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.” ― Warren Buffett “I learned to go into business only with people whom I like, trust, and admire.” ― Warren Buffett “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 “You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.” ― Warren Buffett “People always ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most.” ― Warren Buffett “[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.” ― Warren Buffett “Wall Street is the only place that people drive to in a Rolls Royce to take advice from people who ride the subway.” ― Warren Buffett “If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.” ― Warren Buffett “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But, if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” ― Warren Buffett “Gold is a way of going long on fear, and it has been a pretty good way of going long on fear from time to time. But you really have to hope people become more afraid in a year or two years than they are now. And if they become more afraid you make money, if they become less afraid you lose money, but the gold itself doesn’t produce anything.” ― Warren Buffett “In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.” ― Warren Buffett “Having firstrate people on the team is more important than designing hierarchies and clarifying who reports to whom” ― Warren Buffett “If you see somebody with even reasonable intelligence and a terrific passion for what they do and who can get people around them to march, even when those people can't see over the top of the next hill, things are gonna happen” ― Warren Buffett “In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions.” ― Warren Buffett “I like it when people say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good-looking painting.’ But it’s my painting, and when somebody says, ‘Why don’t you use more red instead of blue?’ Good-bye. It’s my painting. And I don’t care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That’s one of the great things about it.” ― Warren Buffett “It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.” ― Warren Buffett “If you invested in a low-cost index fund--where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years--you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time.” ― Warren Buffett “I made so many mistakes in running the company so far, basically any mistake you can think of I probably made. I think, if anything, the Facebook story is a great example of how if you're building a product that people love you can make a lot of mistakes” ― Mark Zuckerberg “People don't care about what you say, they care about what you build.” ― Mark Zuckerberg When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference. ― Mark Zuckerberg The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently. ― Mark Zuckerberg A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. ― Mark Zuckerberg Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don't do that by having a service people pay for. ― Mark Zuckerberg Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn't smooth. You'll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don't believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don't give up. ― Mark Zuckerberg You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you're not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people. ― Mark Zuckerberg We are a mission-driven company. In order to do this, we have to build a great team. And in order to do that, you need people to know they can make a bunch of money. So we need a business model to make a lot of money. ― Mark Zuckerberg The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?' ― Mark Zuckerberg When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power. ― Mark Zuckerberg In general, we're a social network. I prefer that because I think it is focused on the people part of it - as opposed to some people call it social media, which I think focuses more on the content. ― Mark Zuckerberg The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like. ― Mark Zuckerberg It's not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad. ― Mark Zuckerberg Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They're keeping up with their friends and family, but they're also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you're not on it now. ― Mark Zuckerberg If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields. ― Mark Zuckerberg This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people. ― Mark Zuckerberg I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don't pretend that if Facebook didn't exist, that this wouldn't even be possible. Of course, it would have. ― Mark Zuckerberg I mean, we've built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it's really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that's what's so amazing about the scale that it's at today. ― Mark Zuckerberg We're running the company to serve more people. ― Mark Zuckerberg In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people's perspectives... I really try and live the mission of the company and... keep everything else in my life extremely simple. ― Mark Zuckerberg I think what we've found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about, they tend to be more engaging. I think that we're really going to see this huge shift where a lot of industry is and products are just going to be remade to be social. ― Mark Zuckerberg When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don't want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren't. There are pranks, IMs. ― Mark Zuckerberg Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn't have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they're thinking and have their voice be heard. ― Mark Zuckerberg What really motivates people at Facebook is building something that's worthwhile, that they're going to be proud to show to friends and family. ― Mark Zuckerberg Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January. ― Mark Zuckerberg Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they're thinking and have their voice be heard. ― Mark Zuckerberg I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded. ― Mark Zuckerberg