My top highlights from this book: 1. His career was to him a tremendous adventure. 2. I have always made it a rule, which I have found by some years experience a safe and profitable one, to have nothing to do with newspaper articles. 3. It is consoling to be thus reminded that the lunatic fringe is a hardy perennial and not a phenomeno...

Here are some of my favorite ideas from the book: Hack away at the unessential: Coco made hats that were stripped of embellishments, of the frills that she dismissed as weighing a woman down. . . Nothing makes a woman look older than obvious expensiveness, ornateness, complication, she said. Be default aggressive: Coco began to edge he...

My highlights from the book: 1. A business can only be managed well if one pays as much attention to the smaller business transactions as one does to the larger ones. 2. All banks have histories, only the Rothschilds have a mythology. 3. Ever since the second decade of the nineteenth century, there has been speculation about the origin...

My highlights from the book: 1. Riches cover a multitude of woes. 2. Only a few crumbling bricks are left today of the dark, foul-smelling alley in Frankfurt where, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a disenfranchised Jew named Meyer Rothschild founded a European banking dynasty. 3. Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaus...

My highlights from the book: 1. I started thinking about London and the German aerial assault of 1940-41, and wondered how on earth anyone could have endured it: fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, followed by an intensifying series of nighttime raids over the next six months. In particular I thought about Winston Churchill: How...

My highlights from the book: 1. Sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed. 2. Each game taught me something, each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way, and each game contributed to what came after it. 3. We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do. 4. If my gravest...

My highlights from the book: 1. Hastily pulled together to fight the Axis, OSS was an odd creature—at once a collection of men and women from the upper crust of society on America's east coast, and a magnet for astonishingly talented and creative people from all walks of life, from Wall Street lawyers to Hollywood filmmakers, even the ...

My highlights from the book: 1. It was the summer I turned fifteen, a magical season for me because that year I'd discovered exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest. 2. I'm not exactly sure why I chose body...

My highlights from the book: 1. Casey pursued a Spartan business philosophy that emphasized military discipline, drab uniforms, and reliability over flash. 2. I had heard stories about the company's tireless founder. He was a living legend. Jim Casey started working from the age of eleven to support a family of five. 3. Casey began at ...

My highlights from the book: 1. The cameraman was excited and more than a little nervous. In a matter of moments he would enjoy a unique opportunity: the chance to snap the first unposed picture ever taken of the richest man in the world. The strange thing was that most Americans had never even heard of Daniel Keith Ludwig. 2. How coul...

My highlights from the book: 1. The more successful Linux and open source became the least he wanted to talk about it. The accidental revolutionary started Linux beause playing on a computer was fun. 2. Revolutionaries aren't born. Revolutions can't be planned. Revolutions can't be managed. Revolutions happen. 3. Basically it is short ...

My highlights from the book: 1. Naval has changed my life for the better, and if you approach the following pages like a friendly but highly competent sparring partner, he might just change yours. 2. Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom. 3. If you don't ...

My highlights from the book: 1. Ford generally accepted the responsibilities of his celebrity-he'd worked diligently to cultivate it, realizing early on that his personal fame heightened demand for Model Ts. 2. Ford's Model T changed everything. Thanks in great part to Ford's innovative assembly line, Model Ts were mass-produced on a p...

My highlights from the book: 1. It dawned on me that the hordes of financial novices might be ripe for a history that would chronicle how the old Wall Street evolved into the new. A straight history would be a tedious task for readers and do small justice to the turbulent pageant of heroes and scoundrels I was unearthing. 2. So I posed...

My highlights from the book: 1. Microsoft had become the first software company to sell more than a billion dollars worth of software in a single year. 2. Gates was the undisputed mastermind of that success, a brilliant technocrat, ruthless salesman, and manipulative businessman. 3. Gates had slammed his fist into his palm and vowed to...

My highlights from the book: 1. Morgan was the most influential of these businessmen. He wasn’t the richest but that didn’t matter; he was commanding in a way none could match. 2. He was comfortable in his dominion, though never with his fame. 3. Morgan had an aristocrat’s disdain for public sentiment and the conviction that his action...

My highlights from the book: 1. Few men of Loomis’ prominence and achievement have gone to greater lengths to foil history. 2. Independently wealthy, iconoclastic, and aloof, Loomis did not conform to the conventional measure of a great scientist. He was too complex to categorize—financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, in...

My highlights from the book: 1. When Hearst was in college, he wrote his father that he intended to do something in publishing and politics -and he did, becoming San Francisco's, then New York's, and finally the nation's most powerful publisher. He served two terms in Congress and was, for half a century, a major force in American poli...

My highlights from the book: 1. The town of Hershey had been created first in the imagination of the chocolate industrialist Milton S. Hershey, who then made it real in a place where there had been little more than a few farmhouses and acres of corn. The chocolate factory, the school, and the town were supposed to make up a self-perpet...

My highlights from the book: 1. Brilliantly told, Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his forty-seven years, he seemingly lived five lives: he traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplie...

My highlights from the book: 1. There really were poor Texas boys who discovered gushing oil wells and became overnight billionaires, patriarchs of squabbling families who owned private islands and colossal mansions and championship football teams, who slept with movie stars, and jousted with presidents, and tried to corner an internat...

My highlights from the book: 1. Sam Walton was no ordinary man. He was a genius in business with an iron mind —some say pig-headed—unwilling to compromise any of his carefully thought out policies and principles. 2. To him, making money was only a game. A test of his imagination and expertise to see how far he could drive a business co...

My highlights from the book: 1. At age thirty Fredrick Wallace Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating Federal Express had become too expensive and was fast fizzling out. He had exhausted his father’s Greyhound Bus millions. He was hock for 15 or 20 million more. He appeared in danger of losing his cargo jet planes and also hi...

My highlights from the book: 1. The fatigue of the climb was great but it is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one’s second wind. I think that is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one’s mental efforts. Most people go through life without ever discovering the existence...

My highlights from the book: 1. You don’t work all of your life to do something so you don’t have to do it. 2. Beginning with the first strip published on October 2nd, 1950, until the last published on Sunday, February 13th, 2000, the day after his death, Schultz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the dail...

My highlights from the book: 1. The whole point of moving things forward is that you run into problems, failures, things that don't work. You need to back up and try again. Each one of those times when you have a setback, you get back up and you try again. You're using resourcefulness; you're using self-reliance; you're trying to inven...

My highlights from the book: 1. I felt great admiration for men who were fearless and I had a great desire to be like them. 2. There runs a theme of the pleasure and pride in being the first to see or do something, an eagerness to set himself apart from the others, to distinguish himself, to get out ahead of them; or simply be alone, a...

My highlights from the book: 1. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. 2. She deserves respect as a person who, rising above the expectations of her background and gender and defying plagues of family demons, dedicated herself diligently to complex mathematical feats that most of us never would or could attempt. 3....

My highlights from the book: 1. I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1936. By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety o...

My highlights from the book: 1. Excellence as a goal in itself had been drummed into him from early boyhood. 2. I’m convinced that to achieve real greatness a person needs above all to have passion but at the same time immense discipline, concentration, patience and an unshakeable determination to become a master of his craft. 3. There...