Initiative Quotes

Progress is not inevitable. It's up to us to create it.

Volunteer for something extra, volunteer for something hard. One of the reasons that I got the opportunities that I got was that I would raise my hand when my boss was out of town and he or she was visiting stores or something, and someone needed to pinch hit and go to a meeting, I would go, and if I knew the answer to the question that came up, I'd share it, if I didn't, I'd say, "I don't know, but I'll find out fast and get back to you." I then put myself in an environment where I became a low risk promotion because people had already seen me do the job.

Look around at things that just aren't getting done. Maybe there's a project you could tackle. Maybe there's an issue that always gets back-burnered for other priorities. Challenge yourself to take on those difficult assignments. They're learning opportunities, and you have a chance to change something for the better.

There just aren't that many opportunities in the world that are that big, and for a company like Walmart that needs to move the needle in a big way, you have to take some big bets, but if you're going to take that much risk, the reward has to match up.

Around the world, Walmart associates feel more comfortable taking risk. They're launching minimum viable products to test and learn from. These have enough function to satisfy early adopters, whose feedback informs future design.

It is unwise to make education too cheap. If everything is provided freely, there is a tendency to put no value on anything. Education must always have a certain price on it; even as the very process of learning itself must always require individual effort and initiative.

We are deeply unified in our support of basic principles: our belief in stability in our financial structure, in our determination we must have fiscal responsibility, in our determination not to establish and operate a paternalistic sort of government where a man's initiative is almost taken away from him by force.

We have the right to choice of our own work and to the reward of our own toil. It inspires the initiative that makes our productivity the wonder of the world.

People must understand the Clean Ganga program, as an economic activity also. The Gangetic plains account for 40% of our population. They have over one hundred towns, and thousands of villages.

People of accomplishments rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.

Democracy...We know it cannot die - because it is built on the unhampered initiative of individual men and women joined together in a common enterprise - an enterprise undertaken and carried through by the free expression of a free majority.

We realize we must continually seek improved practices to insure the continuance of reasonable profits, together with scientific progress, individual initiative, opportunities for the little fellow, fair prices, decent wages and continuing employment.

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine.

The history of the movement reveals that Negro-white alliances have played a powerfully constructive role, especially in recent years. While Negro initiative, courage and imagination precipitated the Birmingham and Selma confrontations and revealed the harrowing injustice of segregated life, the organized strength of Negroes alone would have been insufficient to move Congress and the administration without the weight of the aroused conscience of white America.

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.

The trouble with most people is that they quit before they start.