Larry Ellison Quotations | Page 3

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.

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.

We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.

Guys were knocked down time and time again, but kept getting up to do what had to be done to keep us alive. It's a tough crew, but the guys were choked up. We were learning of people dying.

While that may underscore our database growth in the fourth quarter, it bodes extremely well for database sales in the first quarter, and the second quarter and the third quarter, ... It's because we didn't sweep the table in the fourth quarter and we will never sweep the table again.

When I first came into this industry I was told that IBM was not someone against whom you would compete, ... That IBM was not a company. They were more like a country and a great country at that, and that I shouldn't even think of competing with IBM.

Based on our current pipelines the entire management team believes that the overall year should be very strong, ... Specifically we expect that Oracle's software sales will grow faster this year than last. And margins should continue to improve as well.

All our acquisitions are designed to move us into the number one position. Because we believe the lion's share of profits go to category leaders.

Last quarter we got through it with record profitability record margins, ... In light of Sept. 11, it will be very difficult for us to do that again this quarter.

Most companies don't want their data co-mingled with other customers. Small companies will tolerate it.