Larry Ellison quotes
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“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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“The things that caused problems for me in school are the same things that help me succeed in the world.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“Life's a journey. It's a journey about discovering limits.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“See things in the present, even if they are in the future.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, 'I'd like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?'”
-- Larry Ellison -
“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'.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“I believe people have to follow their dreams-I did.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“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.”
-- Larry EllisonSource : "Prophet of Software". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. May 22, 1997.
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“Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.”
-- Larry EllisonSource : "Lesson #4: Break Through That Wall". www.evancarmichael.com.
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“Think of it as you want it, not as it is!”
-- Larry Ellison -
“When you're the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you're basically saying, "I'm right, and everyone else is wrong." That's a very unpleasant position to be in. It's at once exhilarating and at the same time an invitation to be attacked.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“I greatly admire GE, their utterly ruthlessly focused management, to get the cost out and get this integration done.’ Okay, we may make a few mistakes along the way but we are not going to waste any time.' They make decisions; they are incredibly disciplined and focused.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Everyone thought the acquisition strategy was extremely risky because no one had ever done it successfully. In other words, it was innovative.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better”
-- Larry Ellison -
“If an innovative piece of software comes along, Microsoft copies it and makes it part of Windows. This is not innovation; this is the end of innovation.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Microsoft is already the most powerful company on earth but you ain't seen nothing yet.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“When you write a program for Android, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything, and at the very end, you push a button and say, Convert this to Android format.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it--a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all--you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Right now, 70 percent of the people don't have computers. And where they're needed most, people don't have them. We think this will enable anyone to own a computer. We're aiming at everybody who uses a computer as an information access device. The original idea was to build one cheaply enough to put one on every desk.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, 'We're going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.' Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“In some ways, getting away from the headquarters and having a little time to reflect allows you to find errors in your strategy. You get to rethink things. Often, that helps me correct a mistake that I made or someone else is about to make.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“In order to grow at this pace, there will have to be a couple of acquisitions along the way. The tricky thing is to grow at this rate and maintain a 40 percent operating margin.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“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 get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“You can't spend as much money as I have, even if you try. I've been trying.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“I'm addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“I have had all the disadvantages required for success.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Bill Gates wants people to think he's 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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who is going to build.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“I have hobbies. I do all sorts of ridiculous things,”
-- Larry Ellison -
“What can a sales person say to somebody to get them to buy a product that they already use every day if they don't like it? Nothing.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“It's my job for Oracle, the number two software company in the world; to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“I think I am very goal oriented. I'd like to win the America's cup. I'd like Oracle to be the No 1 software company in the world. I still think it is possible to beat Microsoft.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“I think after a certain amount, I’m going to give almost everything I have to charity. What else can you do with it? You can't spend it, even if you try. I've been trying.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“I have run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering. I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middle ware team, the applications team. I run engineering and I will do that until the board throws me out of there.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“If your cash is about to run out, you have to cut your cash flow. CEOs have to make those decisions and live with them however painful they may be. You have to act and act now; and act in the best interest of the company as a whole, even if it means that some people in the company who are your best friends have to work somewhere else.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“Winning is not enough. All others must lose.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.”
-- Larry Ellison -
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“Once the business data have been centralized and integrated, the value of the database is greater than the sum of the preexisting parts.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“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.”
-- Larry Ellison -
“It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."”
-- Larry Ellison
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