Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

Well, you might as well imitate your own program because if you don't, someone else will.

Often, I'm sitting opposite a client, and I'm thinking, 'How do I convince him to not copy the best-selling product out there?' And sometimes I don't know. Really, it's smarter to be a thief.

Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success.

They copied all they could copy, But they couldn't copy my mind; And I left them sweatin' and stealin', A year and a half behind.

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

I don't think anybody came into the movie business to be unoriginal and plagiarising and not having an original idea in their brain.

I had a history for starting something and maybe getting halfway done. Then I'd see the same thing I was doing on the bestseller list! My ideas were right, but I hadn't done them fast enough.

A lot of my business is about protecting creativity.

If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.

You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

We Americans love original ideas. But truly, there are already plenty of good ones out there, ours for the taking. If I were too proud to copy the ideas of others, I likely wouldn't have even a fraction of my current success.

The reality is, is that we love competition, at Apple. We think it makes us all better. But we want people to invent their own stuff.

The only way you can get good, unless you're a genius, is to copy. That's the best thing. Just steal.

Actually, everything has been said in print... it's a battle of giants and it's something that Walt would say is none of your business - go right on and create the best you can.

It's difficult to innovate, but you must try to create a project under your ideas and philosophies to take you ahead of other clubs.

You can't patent a move. It's challenging enough to come up with a move that nobody else does... I try and do things that I would want to see done that I haven't seen other people do. Most wrestlers obviously don't think that way, and instead they steal somebody's move as soon as they've gone on to the next company.

Some in Europe take a plane, fly to Silicon Valley, visit and look and come back and say we need to do the same thing. Well you can copy others... but if you always copy others, you never get ahead.

You got to be able to reinvent yourself and come up with new ideas because everybody is going to try to copy, which is what you want. You want people to start saying what you say.

The antidote to stagnation is innovation.

Every story I read about Google is about us vs some other company, or something else, and I really don't find that interesting. We should be building great things that don't exist. Being negative is not how we make progress.

You cannot innovate by copying.

All too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.

Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it

"Why is the creative entrepreneur the riskiest type to be?" I asked. "Because being creative means you are often a pioneer. It is easy to copy a successful and proven product. It is also less risky. If you learn to innovate, create, or invent your way to success, you are an entrepreneur creating new value rather than an entrepreneur who wins by copying."