Top 70 Larry Ellison Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.”

— Larry Ellison

Featured in: Startup Quotes

2. “I’m addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.”

— Larry Ellison

3. “Winning is not enough. All others must lose.”

— Larry Ellison

4. “You have to act and act now.”

— Larry Ellison

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

— Larry Ellison

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

— Larry Ellison

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

— Larry Ellison

8. “Life’s a journey. It’s a journey about discovering limits.”

— Larry Ellison

9. “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

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

Featured in: Life Is Short Quotes

11. “I have had all the disadvantages required for success.”

— Larry Ellison

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

— Larry Ellison

13. “Think of it as you want it, not as it is!”

— Larry Ellison

14. “I’m right, and everyone else is wrong.”

— Larry Ellison

15. “Act confident, even when you’re not.”

— Larry Ellison

16. “You cannot innovate by copying.”

— Larry Ellison

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

— Larry Ellison

18. “All you can do is all you can do.”

— Larry Ellison

19. “I believe people have to follow their dreams-I did.”

— Larry Ellison

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

— Larry Ellison

21. “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

22. “I hate the PC, with a passion.”

— Larry Ellison

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

— Larry Ellison

24. “Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about.”

— Larry Ellison

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Larry Ellison

29. “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

30. “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?”

— Larry Ellison

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements.”

— Larry Ellison

35. “Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.”

— Larry Ellison

36. “Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane.”

— Larry Ellison

37. “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.”

— Larry Ellison

38. “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

39. “Five years from now, I don’t know how I’ll think.”

— Larry Ellison

40. “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

41. “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

42. “You can’t spend as much money as I have, even if you try. I’ve been trying.”

— Larry Ellison

43. “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

44. “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

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

— Larry Ellison

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Larry Ellison

48. “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

49. “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

50. “We have been doing things that are contrary; the things that people tell us won’t work from the beginning. In fact, the only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.”

— Larry Ellison