Top 100 Quotes About Larry Ellison
#1. So, what you can do in Microsoft Word is what Bill Gates has decided. What you can do in Oracle Database is what Larry Ellison and his crew have decided.
Ted Nelson
#2. You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.
Larry Ellison
#3. My favorite museums are things like the Frick Museum in New York and the Huntington Hartford in Pasadena where it's someone's home that you walk through.
Larry Ellison
#4. 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.
Larry Ellison
#5. You cannot measure a man by his riches but by the quality of the woman holding his hand.
Avra Amar Filion
#6. 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
#7. I know some people are offended by the fact that I'm spending a lot of money trying to win the America's Cup. I could have given all that money to charity.
Larry Ellison
#8. 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
#9. We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade. We don't decide for you.
Larry Ellison
#10. You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.
Larry Ellison
#11. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about.
Larry Ellison
#12. Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who's going to build.
Larry Ellison
#13. I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing videogames.
Larry Ellison
#14. The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.
Larry Ellison
#15. I own a home in Kyoto, Japan actually on the temple on grounds in Nanzenji that is going to become a Japanese art museum.
Larry Ellison
#16. I was vehemently against acquisitions. Now let's buy everything in sight. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. We are a little more strategic than that. But everything was on sale.
Larry Ellison
#17. Game-playing is more fun when it's virtual because you're more successful ... in reality, only one person gets to be LeBron.
Larry Ellison
#18. So what makes me happy? I was really happy to build this house. That's it; building things. The trouble with software is that it's very hard to show your aunt in Florida what you've done.
Larry Ellison
#19. 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
#20. Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.
Larry Ellison
#21. Everyone thought the acquisition strategy was extremely risky because no one had ever done it successfully. In other words, it was innovative.
Larry Ellison
#23. We've announced an Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, a bunch of low-cost commodity servers running Linux, integrated in our case, with InfiniBand - connected with InfiniBand vs. the traditional Ethernet.
Larry Ellison
#24. When I was a kid a long time ago, when the sun rose, I was outside on my bike. If my parents were lucky - poor parents! - I would be home before it got dark.
Larry Ellison
#25. People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don't like change. A bunch of people don't like the Olympics now because we've added skateboarding ... We're modernizing the sport.
Larry Ellison
#26. The things that caused problems for me in school are the same things that help me succeed in the world.
Larry Ellison
#27. The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.
Larry Ellison
#29. 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
#30. I have hobbies. I do all sorts of ridiculous things,
Larry Ellison
#31. 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
#32. What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people - ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.
Larry Ellison
#33. Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020.
Larry Ellison
#35. 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
#36. We have most of the software industry running Autonomy.
Larry Ellison
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Larry Ellison
#39. Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.
Larry Ellison
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.
Larry Ellison
#45. 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
#46. We think we're going to be especially strong in platform where we have our two platform brands: our database brand is the Oracle Database 12c, and our programming language brand is this thing called Java.
Larry Ellison
#47. Microsoft is already the most powerful company on earth but you ain't seen nothing yet.
Larry Ellison
#48. One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water.
Larry Ellison
#49. I'm addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.
Larry Ellison
#50. Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.
Larry Ellison
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Those that believe this is merely a downturn are mad. Our industry is going to mature and as something matures, the rate of innovation does slow.
Larry Ellison
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Oracle's latest database, version 12c, was specifically designed for the cloud. Oracle 12c makes all your Oracle applications multitenant applications without you having to make any changes whatsoever to your applications.
Larry Ellison
#57. 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
#58. There will be no new architecture for computing for the next 1,000 years.
Larry Ellison
#59. Life's a journey. It's a journey about discovering limits.
Larry Ellison
#60. When you find errors in conventional wisdom-when everyone says A and A is not true-you gain competitive advantage. Only a few times do you have to find errors in conventional wisdom to make a living.
Larry Ellison
#61. What is Oracle? It's people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people.
Larry Ellison
#62. 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 Ellison
#63. 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
#64. Mr. Ellison is like a pomegranate: messy, leaves stains, more seeds than meat, but you pick one by one and discover all the little bits were worth it.
Avra Amar Filion
#65. Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.
Larry Ellison
#66. 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
#68. 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
#69. I'm going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism. I've got Japanese.
Larry Ellison
#70. Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.
Larry Ellison
#72. 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
#73. If I see Danny Hillis quoted as an expert on MPP one more time, I'm going to puke.
Larry Ellison
#74. 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
#75. If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.
Larry Ellison
#76. Most companies don't want their data co-mingled with other customers. Small companies will tolerate it.
Larry Ellison
#77. It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.
Larry Ellison
#78. 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
#79. Modernization, socialization, and progression doesn't alter nor permit discarding the morals and the laws one should abide themselves too.
Avra Amar Filion
#80. See things in the present, even if they are in the future.
Larry Ellison
#81. If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden.
Larry Ellison
#82. I believe people have to follow their dreams - I did.
Larry Ellison
#83. Lanai at one time grew 98% of the world's pineapples. But the world's pineapples are now grown in two places, Costa Rica and Panama, because no one wants to spend $45 for a pineapple from the United States.
Larry Ellison
#84. I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.
Larry Ellison
#85. I love sailing. I like it more when I am winning.
Larry Ellison
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.
Larry Ellison
#90. Five years from now, I don't know how I'll think.
Larry Ellison
#91. We will still be enormously profitable and by far the most profitable enterprise software company.
Larry Ellison
#92. 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
#93. Mr. Ellison summed himself up by this sad but yet perfectly put statement. It shows his desire to express himself but can't find the words to do so; a man full of emotions and yet unable to share it in a verbal manner....
Avra Amar Filion
#94. They don't call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I'm no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.
Larry Ellison
#95. It's surreal to think that I own this beautiful island. It doesn't feel like anyone can own Lanai. What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.
Larry Ellison
#96. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane.
Larry Ellison
#97. We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we're going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water.
Larry Ellison
#98. Jobs put his hand on Ellison's left shoulder, pulled him so close that their noses almost touched, and said, Larry, this is why it's really important that I'm your friend. You don't need any more money.
Walter Isaacson
#99. Maui reminded me of San Diego: beautiful, but crowded.
Larry Ellison
#100. 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
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