Anand Samuel

“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
― Jeff Bezos

“us, Will had invited his camp counselor buddy, Dylan, and Dylan had brought along his roommate, this annoying kid named Sanjay. I mean, it wasn’t like there was anything wrong with Sanjay, and no, I’m not prejudiced against Indian people or anyone else. It was just awkward. The rest of us were jocks and hard partiers, and Sanjay was a skinny nerd who looked like he was about twelve years old. And that’s fine, you know? Go ahead and be a nerd if that’s what makes you happy. Go design your app or whatever. Just don’t ask me to give a shit. “Sanjay’s in the Honors College,” Dylan informed us. “Majoring in Electrical Engineering. Talk about badass.” I guess you have to give Dylan some credit. He was trying to be a good roommate, doing his best to include Sanjay in the conversation and make him feel comfortable. It was just a waste of time, that’s all. Sanjay wasn’t going to be friends with us, and we weren’t going to be friends with him.”
― Tom Perrotta, Mrs. Fletcher

“Each man’s place in the company hierarchy, perhaps painfully won over many years, became meaningless if his new super boss, the conglomerator, didn’t see things his way. Robert Metz told in The New York Times about an executive of an acquired company who observed that he and his colleagues had been given what he called the “mushroom treatment”: “Right after the acquisition, we were kept in the dark. Then they covered us with manure. Later they cultivated us. After that, they let us stew for a while. And, finally, they canned us.”
― John Brooks, The Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street's Bullish 60s

“Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged