Larry Ellison Quotes

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

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.

If I see Danny Hillis quoted as an expert on MPP one more time, I'm going to puke.

I saw that we needed to grow but our top line wasn't growing, so we had to find other ways to grow the business. We had to reshape our business and acquire share in a non conventional way. But most tech leaders don't come out of a business background. They really have a parochial point of view. All they know are the go-go years of Silicon Valley. That's the environment in which they were raised.

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.

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.

I'm addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.

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.

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

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

I have had all the disadvantages required for success.

Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.

Winning is not enough. All others must lose.

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.

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

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

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

If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it - a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all - you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.

... 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.

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

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.

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.

I love sailing. I like it more when I am winning.

Act confident, even when you're not.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You cannot innovate by copying.

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

I'd prefer people read about Churchill and how he wasn't overwhelmed by Nazi Germany. Amazing; that the morale of a country rested on one person's shoulders. Extraordinary people carried that country through its darkest hours; truly inspirational. I suppose that's my theme. Whether it's a biography or a movie; whether it's fictional or true, I'm inspired by people doing great things.

We will still be enormously profitable and by far the most profitable enterprise software company.

When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.

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.