“Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!”

Interview with Inc. Magazine for its "The Entrepreneur of the Decade Award" (1 April 1989) http://www.inc.com/magazine/19890401/5602.html
1980s
Variant: You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.

Speaking in Carnegie Hall, New York City, on 4 April 1919.

Context: As a soldier who has spent a quarter of his life in the study of the science of arms, let me tell you I went into the British Army believing that if you want peace you must prepare for war. I believe now that if you prepare thoroughly and efficiently for war, you get war.

Variant: Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play and very hard play, but still play.

The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture I: Work, sections 23-24 (1866)

Source: Horns