Business Quotes

“When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you’ve had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man!”
― Jay-Z

“If those who are sent to draw water begin by drinking themselves, the army is suffering from thirst. [One may know the condition of a whole army from the behavior of a single man.]”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Oh what a wanker I am the greatest wanker of 'em all!”
― Boris Johnson

“I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I'd get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn't get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.”
― Patricia C. Wrede

“Someone may have all the technical knowledge, scientific intellect and business know-how but when he/she decides to choose laziness, excuses, procrastination, complaining and other bad attitudes, his/her relevance is meaningless.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Using your talent, hobby or profession in a way that makes you contribute with something good to this world is truly the way to go.”
― Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish

“To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Cream always rises to the top...so do good leaders".”
― John Paul Warren

“She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor.

The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground.

One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.”
― Jess C Scott, Jack in the Box

“In my world, people are always plotting. You
have no idea of all the crimes people in business commit every
day. Like it was nothing. Or there’s a set of special rules for them.
Remember when Bush made that whole speech about ‘corporate
ethics’ last year? What a fraud. You think stuff like Enron or
WorldCom is an aberration? It’s only the tip. Business is a religion.
Probably the only one practiced all over the world.”
― Andrew Vachss, Down Here

“As long as politics is the shadow of big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”
― John Dewey

“There is enough dough in the world to make bread for us all to eat together.”
― Habeeb Akande

“... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.

[2002] p.46”
― Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life

“That is why enemies can be great motivators. They serve as fuel for your fire.”
― Simon Zingerman, We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish

“Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press”
― Warren Buffett

“I used to use business to make money. But I've learned that business is a tool. You can use it to support what you believe in.”
― Po Bronson, What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question

“Patience is a virtue not a vice.”
― Agu Jaachynma N.E.

“After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection--not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation.
Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.”
― Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito

“An entrepreneur without funding is a musician without an instrument.”
― Robert A. Rice Jr.

“You can perhaps, in a number of circumstances, tell yourself that you can't have more than you have until you do better than you're doing, but by all means steer clear of its reverse, the creed of defeat, in saying that you can't do better than you're doing until you can have more than you have.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Businesspeople are like sharks, not just because we're gray and slightly oily, or because our teeth trail the innards of those we have eviscerated, but because we must move forward or die. ”
― Stanley Bing

“A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really preached the extension of business rather than the preservation of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

“The lesson here is clear: If you want people to understand that you value their contributions and that they are important, the recognition and praise you provide must have meaning that is specific to each individual.”
― Tom Rath, How Full Is Your Bucket?

“Happiness is a good business these days, more you talk crap about happiness the large number of crowd you will gather.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I've done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin's success. I am aware that the ideas of business as being fun and creative goes right against the grain of convention, and it's certainly not how the they teach it at some of those business schools, where business means hard grind and lots of 'discounted cash flows' and net' present values'.”
― Richard Branson, Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way

“In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“We first become salesmen as children in the confession booths of our parents.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Miss Climpson," said Lord Peter, "is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity, Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers' money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death