Business Quotes
More Business Quotes
The private ownership of great art, its seclusion from the general view of men and women, let alone from that of interested amateurs and scholars, is a curious business. The literal disappearance of a Turner or a Van Gogh into some Middle Eastern or Latin-American bank vault to be kept as investment and collateral, the sardonic decision of a Greek shipping tycoon to put an incomparable El Greco on his yacht, where it hangs at persistent risk — these are phenomena that verge on vandalism.
George Steiner— "The Cleric of Treason"
It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.
thomas jefferson— Letter to George Washington (4 January 1786)
We have?fought for our place in the sun and have won it.It will be my business to seethat we retain this place in the sun unchallenged.
Kaiser Wilhelm II— 1901Speech in Hamburg,18 Jun. Quoted in TheTimes, 20 Jun.
Management Science [Journal] also strives to stimulate research in emerging domains created by economic globalization, public policy shifts, technological improvements, and trends in management practice. Its audience includes academics at business and engineering schools and managers open to the application of quantitative methods in business.
— About Management Science at pubsonline.informs.org/journal/mnsc, 2013: Quote about the Management Science journal
You need your family in this business. It's one of the most important things to keep you grounded. You come home and your mom's like, "Clean the kitty's litter box." It's not like it's all about me.
kirsten dunst— Interview in The Guardian (14 October 2000)
For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work.
vera brittain— Chapter 11
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a sub-prime fish loan and you're in business, buddy.
stephen colbert— A parody of the "Give a man a fish..." proverb alluding to the subprime mortgage crisis of the aughts on The Colbert Report (14 May 2008)
Napoleon said Britain is a nation of shopkeepers and a shopkeeper is an entrepreneur he or she is a small business person. That’s exactly what we are.
— Theo Paphitis, Greek Cypriot born British entrepreneur. ‘Theo Pathitis: Business Adventurer’, an interview on The Open University’s website, open2.net, published on 23 December 2009
The UFO research and investigation business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps of corrupt ideology run free, agenda dictates, delusion is rampant and ignorance prevails. The infestation of wrongful motivation and the beggarly depths of belief reign supreme amidst a universal disregard for truth and factual actuality... where good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side . . .
kenny young— E-mail from Young to fellow Ufologists Sean Feeney and Paul Koch on December 26, 2001.
Schumpter's daring and dashing entrepreneur is now a legendary figure from the distant past - if not from the mythology of capitalism - or is to be found only in the demimonde of business, founding new ice cream parlors or "deep freeze subscription clubs".
paul a. baran— Chapter Three, Standstill And Movement Under Monopoly Capitalism, I, p. 77
We mean by "politics" the people's business the most important business there is.
adlai stevenson— Speech in Chicago, Illinois (19 November 1955).
Advertise your business. Do not hide your light under a bushel.
— P. T. Barnum. ‘Sundry Business Enterprises’, Ch XIV, ‘Barnum’s Rules for Success in Business’, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 1855.
The mechanism of modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance.
theodore roosevelt— First Annual Message to Congress (1901).
The true entrepreneur is one who thinks laterally, about how to make a second business out of the first.
— Evan Davis (British economist, journalist and presenter), Dragons’ Den: Success from Pitch to Profit (2007), Part 3: Know the Business, p. 245
Every man (who is of sufficient understanding to be responsible for his actions) is supposed to be cognizant of the law, as it is the rule by which every subject of the kingdom is to be governed, and therefore it is his business to know it.
— Willes, J., King v. Shipley (1784), 3 Doug. 177
est was developed from the beginning as a well-organized business enterprise, structured to maximize profits and minimize tax liabilities. Its major corporate arm, Transformational Technologies, is an extreme example of the rationality that pervades some such movements that have as a major goal the maximizing of profit. By 1988, it had trained nearly 400,000 people, all of whom had taken the two-weekend, 60-hour training session, paying a sizable fee ($400 per person) for so doing. est grossed some $30 million dollars in 1981, and it was claimed that one of every nine San Francisco Bay Area college-educated young people had gone through the training.
— Richardson, James T. (1998). "est (THE FORUM)". in Swatos, Jr., William H.. Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira. pp. 167-168. ISBN 0761989560.
The Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) stood up, i.e. on the day of Badr, and said: Uthman has gone off on the business of Allah and His Apostle, and I shall take the oath of allegiance on his behalf. The Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) then allotted him a share, but did not do so for anyone else who was absent.
— Narrated by Abdullah ibn Umar
— Sunan Abu Dawud: Book 14, Number 2720.
I retired from public business from a thorough Conviction that it was not in my Power to do any Good, and very much disgusted with Measures, which appeared to me inconsistent with common Policy and Justice.
george mason— Letter to Arthur Campbell (7 May 1783)
The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise. How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is of bullocks?
Bible (Apocrypha)— Ecclesiasticus 38:24-5.
While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race.
Andrew Carnegie— 1889 'The Gospel of Wealth', in the North American Review, Jun.
Men, some to business, some to pleasure take; But every woman is at heart a rake: Men, some to quiet, some to public strife; But every lady would be Queen for life.
Alexander Pope— 1735 Epistles to Several Persons,'To a Lady', l.215-8.
The first thing [in credit] is character … before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.… A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom. I think that is the fundamental basis of business.
j. p. morgan— Testimony to the Pujo Committee (1912)
Curse on the man who business first designed,And by't enthralled a freeborn lover's mind!
john oldham— Complaining of Absence, 11; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922).
If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety...
warren buffett— 1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, quoted in Andrew Kilpatrick, Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett (Vol. 2), p. 1615
In most cases the favorable price performance will be accompanied by a well-defined improvement in the average earnings, in the dividend, and in the balance-sheet position. Thus in the long run the market test and the ordinary business test of a successful equity commitment tend to be largely identical.
benjamin graham— Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 25
Basilicas should be constructed on a site adjoining the forum and in the warmest possible quarter, so that in winter business men may gather in them without being troubled by the weather.
vitruvius— Chapter I, Sec. 4
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart .
William Butler Yeats— Letter to Frederick J. Gregg (undated, Sligo, late summer, 1886)
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the ?rst task of statesmanship.
— President Theodore Roosevelt, "The Progressive Covenant With The People" speech (1912)
There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.
George Bernard Shaw— George Bernard Shaw, The Man of Destiny.
