“For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.”

Leadership is hard to train on.

The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.

A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.

I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.

When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’

Your employees know each other better than they know you.

The person they’re working with, is going to be the person they’ll know more. So if that person leaves, they’re going to go – well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.

Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

When you’re making a critical decision, you have to understand how it’s going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you’re talking to, but the people that aren’t in the room. Everybody else.

These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies.

What is more comforting to the terrorists around the world: the failure to pass the 9/11 legislation because we lacked a majority of the majority,’ or putting aside partisan politics to enact tough new legislation with America’s security foremost in mind?

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

In Republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.

As for our majority… one is enough.

If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

Let me say to you that truth has always lived with the minority; what the majority says at a given moment is usually wrong.