Larry Ellison quotes: important insight from the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, Lawrence “Larry” Joseph Ellison.
“Life’s a journey. It’s a journey about discovering limits.”
“Think of it as you want it, not as it is!”
“Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.”
“You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.”
“I believe people have to follow their dreams. I did.”
“Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. Sure, there’s the talent, but there also has to be the will. Give me human will and the intense desire to win and it will trump talent every day of the week.”
“Bill Gates wants people to think he is Edison, when he’s really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn’t right. Wealth isn’t the same thing as intelligence.”
“See things in the present, even if they are in the future.”
“If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you’re going to lose. The only way to really be ahead, is to be different.”
“Act confident, even when you’re not.”
“When you are the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you are basically saying, ‘I’m right and everyone else is wrong.’ That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilaration and the same time an invitation to be attacked.”
“You have to act and act now.”
“When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.”
“The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.”
“When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.”
“All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You can’t get frozen like a deer in headlights. All you can do is all you can do.”
“There’s a wonderful saying that’s dead wrong: ‘Why did you climb the mountain? I climbed the mountain because it was there.’ That’s utter nonsense. You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.”
“We saw – we conducted the experiment. I mean, it’s been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we’re gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.”
“A corporation’s primary goal is to make money. Government’s primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others.”
“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.”
“They don’t call it the internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I’m no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.”
“The things that caused problems for me in school are the same things that help me succeed in the world.”
“Both my mother and I were determined that we weren’t going to stay on welfare. We always worked toward doing better, toward having a better life. We never had any doubts that we would.”
“The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes, has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.”
“When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.”
“What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people – ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.”
“We work because work is an act of creation. We identify with it. I look at the company and I think, ‘This is me.'”
“Running a company is all about creative destruction, right? It’s like Woody Allen’s great line about relationships: ‘A relationship is like a shark, it either has to move forward or it dies.’ And that’s true about your company.”
“In marketing, simple messages always win.”
“Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.”
“I think about the business all the time. Well I shouldn’t say all the time. I don’t think about it when I am wake-boarding. But even when I am on vacation, or on my boat; I am on email everyday. I am always prowling around the internet looking at what our competitors are doing.”
“When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.”
“I have had all the disadvantages required for success.”
“I enjoy the competition and the process of learning as we compete. The whole thing is just fascinating. I don’t know what I’ll do when I retire. When I go sailing, I look around… anyone want to race? I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.”
“Five years from now, I don’t know how I’ll think.”
“You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.”
“I’m addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.”
“Winning is not enough. All others must lose.”
“Being first is more important to me than earning money. I have so much money. Whatever money is, it’s just a method of keeping score now. I mean, I certainly don’t need more money.”
“You can’t spend as much money as I have, even if you try. I’ve been trying.”
“To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, ‘I’d like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?'”
