"Anything that's done to address unemployment in terms of massive stimulus spending is going to exacerbate deficits. And anything that's done to address deficits in the short-term is going to exacerbate unemployment."

"I pick up the details that drive the organization insane. But sweating the details is more important than anything else."

"As a leader, I am tough on myself and I raise the standard for everybody; however, I am very caring because I want people to excel at what they are doing so that they can aspire to be me in the future."

"When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response."

"When I grew up there was no web, blogging or tweeting. In fact, where I grew up there was not even television! I met a lot of my friends in school and in college, and they are still my friends today."

"My father was an absolutely wonderful human being. From him I learned to always assume positive intent. Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent."

"I think innovation as a discipline needs to go back and get rethought and revived. There are so many models to talk about innovation, there are so many typologies of innovation, and you have to find a good innovation metric that truly captures the innovation performance of a company."

"Just because you are CEO, don't think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I've never forgotten that."

"I'm very honest - brutally honest. I always look at things from their point of view as well as mine. And I know when to walk away."

"To lead in an ever-changing world, leaders must adapt and stay nimble."

"I grew up in a Hindu household but went to a Roman Catholic school. I grew up with a mother who said, 'I'll arrange a marriage for you at 18,' but she also said that we could achieve anything we put our minds to and encourage us to dream of becoming prime minister or president."

"The whole perspectives in which companies are viewed needs to shift from short to the long-term, and as I would say, to a focus on shapes, not just numbers."

"CEOs need keep an open mind so they can adapt to a rapidly changing world and need to bring an abundant dose of emotional intelligence to the job."

"The CEO has to think long-term and needs to understand the way public and private sectors are coming together and work constructively within that framework. CEOs need to make the phrase "think global and act local" more than a cliche?"

"I think there are at least five ways in which job description will change."

"Aristotle once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I think it's time to examine what we do once more in the spirit of a critical friend. Let's pause for a moment to consider what we need to examine."

"You cannot deliver value unless you anchor the company’s values. Values make an unsinkable ship."

"One should not shy away from creating an environment of adaptability."

"Don’t take an eye on the short term but think long."

"First, accept that turbulence is here to stay. Most successful companies are those that stay calm and think down to earth rather than showing aggressiveness to shorten the crisis period."

"Turbulence is the beginning of a fruitful process of transformation."

"I have an immigrant mentality, which is that the job can be taken away at any time, so make sure you earn it every day...immigrants come here they have no safety net-zero. I landed here with $500 in my pocket. I had no one here to pay for me."

"Each of us in the US - the long middle finger - must be careful that we extend our arm in either a business or political sense, we take pains to assure that we are giving a hand, not the finger. Unfortunately, I think this is how the reset of the world looks at the US right now. Not as part of the hand-giving strength and purpose to the rest of the fingers –but instead scratching our nose and sending a signal."

"Bring together what is good for business with what is good for the world."

"At the end of the day, don’t forget that you are a person, don’t forget you are a mother, don’t forget you are a wife, don’t forget you are a daughter. Because in the end, no matter how much money you make and how much success you create, What you are left is family, friends and faith."

"There were many times that I felt like a fish out of water, times that I really said to myself, 'do I even fit in'."

"You cannot deliver value unless you anchor the company's values. Values make an unsinkable ship." Code of conduct goes beyond legal compliance and every employee needs to be well versed with it."

"I am a mother first, then a CEO and then a wife."

"[moot issue is that ] we should talk about is not just lessons in leadership or what the leaders need to do today but what can India do to bring those leaders back to India, so India itself can become an even more powerful economy going forward."

"Do you remember campaigns like Keep America Beautiful? What about ‘buckle up’? I believe we need an approach like this to attack obesity. Let us be good industry that does 100% of what is possibly can-not grudgingly, but willingly."

"Leadership is hard to define and good leadership even harder. But if you can get people to follow you to the ends of the earth, you are a great leader. As a leader I am tough on myself and I raise the standard for everybody; however I am very caring because I want people to excel at what they are doing so that they can aspire to be me in the future."

"As a CEO, I am finding that I have to become a learning CEO. I have to go to school all the time because I am learning new skills that I need to run this company and I am realising that I am not equipped to just coast, I have to constantly renew my skills."

"We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

"Bromidic though it may sound, some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn."

"Learn to breathe, learn to speak, but first..learn to feel."

"It has been said that on screen I personified the American woman."

"Women's Lib? Poor little things. They always look so unhappy. Have you noticed how bitter their faces are?"

"If you have an ounce of common sense and one good friend you don't need an analyst."

"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell."

"Then there was Queen Bee—a Joan Crawford soap. She wrote me a welcoming note saying how she'd always admired veterans of the silent days. And I never had the courage to inform her I was actually a year younger than she was. On every Crawford picture, she had a younger cast member to berate and on this one, when she had to slap pretty little Lucy Marlow, she did so with such fury it could be heard all over the sound stage."

"If you've earned a position, be proud of it. Don't hide it. I want to be recognized. When I hear people say, 'There's Joan Crawford!' I turn around and say, 'Hi! How are you!'"

"I believe in the dollar. Everything I earn, I spend!"

"You have to be self-reliant and strong to survive in this town. Otherwise you will be destroyed."

"I think that the most important thing a woman can have - next to talent, of course - is her hairdresser."

"I never go outside unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door."

"I have always known what I wanted, and that was beauty... in every form."

"Every Negro in America is in one way or another menaced by it. One is born in a white country, a white Protestant Puritan country, where one was once a slave, where all the standards and all the images . . . when you open your eyes on the world, everything you see: none of it applies to you. You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish."

"We must stop spending money that we just don’t have. Historic debt leads to historic tax increases, which stifle job growth.”"

"I think the knowledge about how legislation really affects small businesses is extremely valuable. If you haven’t run a small business, then you don’t have this kind of knowledge about how a regulation passed or taxes increased affects your bottom line. If you recognize that every new regulation takes that much more time to comply with, requires that many more employees, then it really gives you that foundational basis to make those decisions."

"We need to simplify our tax code. We need to make sure that it’s not too cumbersome for people to be able to comply with. And that they don’t end up spending more money trying to file their taxes than they do actually paying in."