Business Quotes

If it was my business, I wouldn't talk about it. It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbroker's do that, and then merely at dinner parties.

~ Oscar Wilde

Your outlook upon life, your estimate of yourself, your estimate of your value are largely colored by your environment. Your whole career will be modified, shaped, molded by your surroundings, by the character of the people whom you come in contact everyday.

~ Orison Swett Marden

What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

~ Frank Herbert

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.

~ Cory Doctorow

At the heart of excessive individualism is a broken heart

~ Robert Holden

The virtues of free enterprise can become distorted by greed & delusion.

~ Allan Lokos

Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a how answer to what is really a why question.

~ Alfie Kohn

Note to the wise: whenever someone insists that he wants to buy something from you, but tells you there’s no real value in it yet, two things are happening: he’s lying, and you’re being taken.

~ Mike Stackpole

A good golfer’s métier is his or her golfing skill.A great golfer’s métier is his or her golfing skill, coupled with the mastery of good sportsmanship, rendering him or her an ambassador for the sport.

~ Lorii Myers

Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street -- a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American.

~ Roger Lowenstein

Some PR is about getting information about a great product or thingy out to the people who would enjoy it, while other PR is about creating a web of lies that conceals the fact that your company harnesses the energy produced by rape and uses it to make a chemical that kills forests for fun. Either way, you're going to need it.

~ Eugene Mirman

More importantly, our software worked. I don't just mean that it didn't bump, or that it performed according to the written specifications, or that it was efficient in producing reports. It really worked

~ Eliyahu M. Goldratt

I may not be the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick the smartest people to do business with and size them up very fast.

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

In the business world, there is no gray. Either you are black, or you are white-washed.

~ Sameer Kamat

Make something people want and sell that, or be someone people need and sell you.

~ Ryan Lilly

I don,t just want success for my self ,I want my success to benefit others .Osman Gulum

~ Osman Gulum

It is a matter of life and death for us, for the lead we gain by day on ships and railways is lost each night.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

What I don't get about traditional publishing is that an author creates a work that they think is good enough to be published. They then have to spend their valuable time begging others to exploit them to point where they end up with a 5% stake in THEIR business. What kind of a screwed of business model is that?

~ David Nicol

Business is all about solving people's problems - at a profit.

~ Paul Marsden

We had all opted to take City's financial reporting course work, which, in theory, meant we wanted to write about stock prices and corporate takeovers. That, of course, was a joke. No one still in their twenties, and broke, goes into journalism to write about money—a subject in which they still have zero practical experience.

~ Chris Ayres

Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies. I don’t understand these things.

~ Max Barry

There are stories — legends, really — of the “steady job.” Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job was for life, not just for the business cycle. … The graduates snicker. A steady job! They’ve never heard of such a thing.

~ Max Barry

The Business of Our Firm is Business-Donald W. Hudspeth from:The Business of America is Business-Calvin Coolidge

~ Calvin Coolidge

Make sure your business is creating a service experience so good that it demands loyalty.

~ Steve Maraboli

Let your motto then always be 'Excelsior', for by living up to it there is no such word as fail.

~ P.t. Barnum

Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose. The parents just shook their heads and smiled. I've made a big investment in you, Peter. Time and money, and it's not working. Now, I could just shake my head and smile. But in my house, when a turd appears, we throw it out. We dispose of it. We flush it away. We don't put it on the table and call it caviar.

~ Tom Wolfe

All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life - that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business - you know they're doing something that you aren't.

~ Malcolm X

The mobile phone acts as a cursor to connect the digital and physical.

~ Marissa Meyer

Customers are human and humans can view situations in unexpected ways.

~ Marilyn Suttle

Many companies expect loyal customers without providing loyal service. This has been the visionary failure of countless corporations.

~ Steve Maraboli

Listen to your customers, not your competitors.

~ Joel Spolsky

Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies.Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory.

~ Ha-Joon Chang

When you put yourself in the customer’s shoes and begin your dialog from there, an immediate connection develops that stems beyond basic commerce and encourages loyalty.

~ Steve Maraboli

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.

~ Cory Doctorow

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

~ George Bernard Shaw

As a business leader you have to ask yourself, “Am I creating a consumer environment that is conducive to loyalty?” If the answer is no, FIX IT!

~ Steve Maraboli

For the most part, the best opportunities now lie where your competitors have yet to establish themselves, not where they're already entrenched. Microsoft is struggling to adapt to that new reality.

~ Paul Allen

We're interested in the mass-merchandising of anything. If there was a market in mass-produced portable nuclear weapons, we'd market them too

~ Alan Sugar

A beverage of leisure is a serious business,” Shane Bowermaster was known to declare. “There can be no product of pleasure without the inverse on the end of the producer.

~ Jeff Phillips

In a company where tech decisions were still ultracentralized, the repercussions of a distracted CEO had to be damaging.

~ Paul Allen