Dan Pallotta Quotes

We tell the for-profit sector, 'Spend, spend, spend on advertising until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value,' but we don't like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity. Our attitude is, 'Well look, if you can get the advertising donated (at four o'clock in the morning) I'm okay with that, but I don't want my donation spent on advertising, I want it to go to the needy,' as if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy.

What's important is how we use our time on this earth, not how conspicuously we give our money away. What's important is the energy and courage we are willing to expend reversing entropy, battling cynicism, suffering and challenging mediocre minds, staring down those who would trample our dreams, taking a stand for magic, and advancing the potential of the human race.

The next time you're looking at a charity, don't ask about the rate of their overhead; ask about the scale of their dreams - their Apple-, Google-, Amazon-scale dreams - how they measure their progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true, regardless of what the overhead is.

When you prohibit failure, you kill innovation.

Our generation does not want its epitaph to read, 'We kept charity overhead low.' We want it to read that we changed the world.

We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. Interesting that we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money NOT helping other people.

It has been said that love is a function of communication. I believe that to be true. I believe, by extension, that human understanding is a function of communication. And the better human beings understand one another, the higher the level of functioning.

Philanthropy is the market for love. It is the market for all those people for whom there is no other market coming.

We aren't upset when Paramount makes a $200 million movie that flops, but if a charity experiments with a $5 million fundraising event that fails, we call in the attorneys. So charities are petrified of trying bold new revenue-generating endeavors and can't develop the powerful learning curves the for-profit sector can.

You can't know if your values are being violated if you're ambiguous about what they are

I have always been terrified of the death of my parents. I never knew if I could count on myself. I never knew if that would send me over the edge.

It's time to stop obsessing about overhead and start focusing on progress. Change charity, and charity can change the world.

If you put these five things together - you can't use money to attract talent, you can't advertise, you can't take risks, you can't invest in long-term results, and you don't have a stock market - then we have just put the humanitarian sector at the most extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector on every level, and then we call the whole system charity, as if there is something incredibly sweet about it.

When we show people that something is possible that they didn't think was possible it does more than just change things. It changes the way people think about the possibility of things changing. It helps them see that life is not the same day-after day, unsurprising, unending drudgery that so much of life teaches them that it is. And that is a huge contribution to their humanity.

And when your phone rings, pick it up. Open yourself up to the possibility a phone call offers. Discover this remarkable device called the telephone. It will give you a serious competitive advantage.