Gordon Bethune Quotes

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.

The truth is that it has not been my pipe dream to have a restaurant. I know restaurateurs, and the amount of work that goes into a restaurant is nothing short of insanity. It's a real commitment, and most restaurants don't make it, so the odds are really against you.

A lot of people came into the airline business. Most of them promptly exited, minus their money.

The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.

Every project for me is a risk that I bet on. I believe my senses, and hopefully it will be successful. But sometimes you make it, and sometimes you fail.

Motto of the U.S. airline industry - "We're Hoping to Have a Motto Announcement in About an Hour."

Pessimists calculate the odds. Optimists believe they can overcome them.

Here's a message to the new borns, waiting to breathe: if you believe then you can achieve. Just look at me, against all odds 'though life is hard, we carry on, livin' in the projects, broke with no lights on. To all the seeds that follow me- protect your essence, born with less, but you still precious.

The most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision, maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face.

Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.

I’m just being myself. There is not an ounce of me that believes any of that crap that they say. We can’t be feminine and be feminists and be successful? I want to be a f-king feminist and wear a f-king Peter Pan collar. So f-king what?

What really fueled me, and maybe infuriated me, is that nobody believed in me. Nobody. I don't even think I believe in myself. Part of what I was trying to do was to make the decision to go into business and find the guts to see it through. I was told that when I went in to see the bankers that I was supposed to be very muted, that I was supposed to blend in, that I was supposed to have the typical drab suit on.

At a certain level, great actors who are successful actors don't have to worry about it. They can just go for it because they believe in themselves.

The average for entrepreneurs is 3.8 failures before they finally make it in business.

I believe that the best measure of whether a nation is going to be successful is whether they are tapping the talents of their women.

I grew up believing that the willingness and ability to work is the basic ingredient of successful farming. Hard, intelligent work is the key. Use it, and your chances for success are good.

Kids win this'n'that every day. Thousands of them. One out of a hundred fights professionally. One out of a thousand's worth watchin', one out of a million's worth coffee and doughnuts.

One of my favorite teams of all time is Fran and Barry. I just thought Fran and Barry last season were just incredible and they just sort of went against all odds and were very successful.

Hope and optimism are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there's enough evidence out there to believe things are gonna be better, much more rational, deeply secular, whereas hope looks at the evidence and says, "It doesn't look good at all. Doesn't look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever." That's hope. I'm a prisoner of hope, though. Gonna die a prisoner of hope.

We are an aspirational society. We believe that circumstances of your birth do not determine your outcome. You shouldn't have to be born to wealthy parents or the right zip code to be successful and do great things in our country!

I think if anyone tells you the odds are slim, just keep walking. Just do whatever the hell you want to do, because they don't know what they're talking about. When you love something, and you work really really hard at it, you can do it.

You can divide airlines into two camps: expensive and cheap. But I believe that we will only distinguish between long-haul and short-haul airlines in the future.

Were kind of in our own cocoon making it. Every once in a while you stick your head up for a second, and you just cant believe how successful the show has become.

I think you learn more about Donald Trump when you learn more about his wife Melania. She can say things, but it's more how much did you get to know her and believe the kind of person she is, that could be married successfully to him. So once you realize that there's something there, that there's substance and that she's got talents and abilities, you think "this is a very complex woman and not just a pretty face" and you know they have a pretty successful marriage and I think that speaks well of him.

It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.