Larry Ellison Quotes

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.

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'.

Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.

The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.

Act confident, even when you're not.

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.

The things that caused problems for me in school are the same things that help me succeed in the world.

See things in the present, even if they are in the future.

You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.

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.

Life's a journey. It's a journey about discovering limits.

Think of it as you want it, not as it is!

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 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.

I am also involved with all the acquisitions and overall strategy. Now it's true, I don't run operations. But I've never really run operations. I've never had the endurance to run sales. The whole idea of selling to the customer just isn't my personality. I'm an engineer, tell me why something isn't working or is and I am curious.

Five years from now, I don't know how I'll think.

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.

Taking care of your employees is extremely important, and very, very visible.

Everyone thought the acquisition strategy was extremely risky because no one had ever done it successfully. In other words, it was innovative.

I have had all the disadvantages required for success.

I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. 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?

If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.

I'm right, and everyone else is wrong.

You have to act and act now.

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.

Because software is all about scale. The larger you are, the more profitable you are. If we sell twice as much as software, it doesn't cost us twice as much to build that software. So the more customers you have, the more scale you have. The larger you are, the more profitable you are.

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.

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.

You can't spend as much money as I have, even if you try. I've been trying.

Winning is not enough. All others must lose.

When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.

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.

You cannot innovate by copying.

All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better

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.

To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, 'I'd like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?'

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?

I hate the PC, with a passion.

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.

Once the business data have been centralized and integrated, the value of the database is greater than the sum of the preexisting parts.

I have hobbies. I do all sorts of ridiculous things.

I believe people have to follow their dreams-I did.

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 wakeboarding. 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.

... Don't mistake any of this for altruism...Fear and greed just doesn't work. If you want to be successful, quality and service just works better.

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who is going to build.

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.

All you can do is all you can do.

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."

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.