Motivational Quotes

Business

The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife.

- Ogilvy, David

Best Quotes about Business

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.

John Cleese

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Baudelaire, Charles

Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.

Chandler, Raymond

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

Oscar Wilde

Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.

Dickens, Charles

Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do.

Morgan, John Pierpont

Markets change, tastes change, so the companies and the individuals who choose to compete in those markets must change.

Wang, An

A man with a surplus can control circumstances, but a man without a surplus is controlled by them, and often has no opportunity to exercise judgment.

Firestone, Harvey S.

If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.

Buffett, Warren

10.

I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity.

Sydney Biddle Barrows

11.

Cut your losses and let your profits run.

Proverb, American

12.

Few great men could pass personal.

Goodman, Paul

13.

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

Ogilvy, David

14.

A generation which has passed through the shop has absorbed standards and ambitions which are not of those of spaciousness, and cannot get away from them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally have in view the greatest possible benefit, profit and that end of the stuff that will make the best show.

Herzen, Alexander

15.

To succeed in business it is necessary to make others see things as you see them.

Patterson, John H.

16.

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

Peters, Thomas J.

17.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.

David M. Ogilvy

18.

Business is not just doing deals; business is having great products, doing great engineering, and providing tremendous service to customers. Finally, business is a cobweb of human relationships.

Perot, H. Ross

19.

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.

Smith, Adam

20.

A man's success in business today turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something that they want.

Lee, Gerald Stanley

21.

Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.

Allen, Fred A.

22.

It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.

Buffett, Warren

23.

I don't want to do business with those who don't make a profit, because they can't give the best service.

Bristol, Lee

24.

You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.

Watson, Thomas J.

25.

If a fellow wants to be a nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mail man to somebody on his behalf.

Kettering, Charles F.

26.

We have yet to see the full impact of the open, global marketplace. By 1997 all raw materials and technology will be available everywhere in the world. The only differences between countries and markets will be skill levels, education, and the level of empowerment of the workplace.

Pritchett, Lew

27.

Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

Blake, William

28.

I believe Mrs. Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.

Blair, Tony

29.

The question is, then, do we try to make things easy on ourselves or do we try to make things easy on our customers, whoever they may be?

Frand, Erwin

30.

The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without and to depart.

Morley, John

31.

Conducting your business in a socially responsible way is good business. It means that you can attract better employees and that customers will know what you stand for and like you for it.

Burns, M. Anthony

32.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

Luce, Henry

33.

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes that he has got the biggest piece.

Erhard, Ludwig

34.

In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.

Young, Owen D.

35.

Only as long as a company can produce a desired, worthwhile, and needed product or service, and can command the public, will it receive the public dollar and succeed

Carlson, Curtis

36.

Quality, service, cleanliness, and value.

Ross, Steven J.

37.

Compromise is usually bad. It should be a last resort. If two departments or divisions have a problem they can't solve and it comes up to you, listen to both sides and then pick one or the other. This places solid accountability on the winner to make it work. Condition your people to avoid compromise.

Townsend, Robert

38.

If each of us hires people smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs.

Ogilvy, David

39.

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.

Thomas, Dylan

40.

You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.

Carnegie, Dale

41.

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.

Ford, Henry

42.

The happiest time in a man's life is when he is in the red hot pursuit of a dollar with a reasonable prospect of overtaking it.

Billings, Josh

43.

A vacation should be just long enough that you're boss misses you, and not long enough for him to discover how well he can get along without you.

44.

If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that -- but that isn't simple.

Lundborg, Louis B.

45.

So much for industry, my friends, and attention to one's own business; but to these we must add frugality if we would make our industry more certainly successful. A man may, if he knows not how to save as he gets, keep his nose all his life to the grindstone, and die not worth a grout at last.

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out -- either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time. Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don't think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.

Ogilvy, David

47.

The morality of compromise' sounds contradictory.Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat.Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

Handy, Charles

48.

You don't want to get the same kind of advice from everyone on your board.

Cardenas, Ruben

49.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

50.

The more I know about business, the more IÆm convinced that it is conducted in homes and churches far more than in office buildings.

Laura Moncur