Linda > Linda's Quotes

“A tooth is much more to be prized than a diamond.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“The best way to predict your future is to create it”
― Peter Drucker

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”
― Peter Drucker

“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”
― Peter Drucker

“Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”
― Peter Drucker

“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.
The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.”
― Peter Drucker

“Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window. ”
― Peter Drucker

“Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people", that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. ”
― Peter Drucker

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
― Peter Drucker

“The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.”
― Peter Drucker

“The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.”
― Peter Drucker

“The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

“Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.”
― Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker

“Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals. Management”
― Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker

“Every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels—training and development that never stop.”
― Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker

“Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself

“The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications; teamwork; self-development; and development of others.”
― Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

“If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved. What the executive needs are criteria which enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.”
― Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

“Effectiveness must be learned.”
― Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

“I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment.....the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy. A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.”
― Peter F. Drucker, The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Everything in life is just for a while.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.”
― Philip K. Dick

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
― Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968