If there’s one thing that’s certain in business, it’s uncertainty.

The first time I stepped on an NBA court I became a businessman.

War is the business of barbarians.

It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‚dragon lady‘ or something like it.

It’s rare for a startup to make money immediately, so you need to make sure that you have enough saved or that you have another income stream that can support you.

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.

Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.

Any time an investment company has to spend heavily on advertising, it’s probably a bad business in which to invest.

As I followed my dream – stayed in-Spirit, that is, inspired – I made more money in the first year after I gave up my employment than I had made in the previous 35 years of my life.

In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.

Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble too big for you.

There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.

A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Change is always tough. Even for those who see themselves as agents of change, the process of starting a new thing can cause times of disorientation, uncertainty and insecurity.

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.

My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right.

The movie business is a big gamble.

But for me to have the opportunity to stand in front of a bunch of executives and present myself, I had to hustle in my own way. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was that they didn’t get that. No joke – I’d leave meetings crying all the time.

We should not moor a ship with one anchor, or our life with one hope.

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

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.

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

Over a 10-year period, 99 out of 100 new entrepreneurs will fail. Only one will be left standing as others get pushed out of the market or burn out from working so hard. It’s really sad.

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.

There are many things that I don’t understand.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

Outsourcing is inevitable, and I don’t think it’s necessarily treating people like things.

I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You’ve got to just stand there and take it.

Tourism provides employment to the poorest of the poor. Gram seller earns something, auto-rickshaw driver earns something, pakoda seller earns something, and tea seller also earns something.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

Marines don’t know how to spell the word ‚defeat‘.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

But, the thing is, since I always had my own little shop and direct access to the public, I’ve been able to build up a technique without marketing people ever telling me what the public wants.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Just because something didn’t work out your way, or somebody disappointed you, that does not change who you are.

I was approached about having my own network many, many years ago. There were some people who wanted to start up a network, and I didn’t want to get that involved in the business aspect of it.

Intelligent people should learn from their experiences. With people on the street, the bad experience has beaten them.

Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.

I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly never wholly overcome me.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

I have discovered that just because we grow weaker physically as we age, it doesn’t mean that we must grow weaker spiritually.

My dad has kind of been the standard for me, he played 16 years in the league, and since I’ve been in the league, every year that I go through and deal with the scratches, the bumps and bruises, just the grind that it is to go through one NBA season.

Why should I be studying for a future that soon may not exist?

I will not be triumphed over.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.