Motivational Quotes

Business

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

- Thomas, Dylan

Best Quotes about Business

Cut your losses and let your profits run.

Proverb, American

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

I think it is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises -- but only performance is reality.

Geneen, Harold S.

What's good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.

Wilson, Charles E.

Business is a combination of war and sport.

Maurois, Andre

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

Patterson, John H.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

Churchill, Winston

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent -- for every effect a perfect cause -- and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

What helps people, helps business.

Burnett, Leo

10.

When two friends have a common bank account, one sings and the other weeps.

Proverb

11.

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

12.

If we decide to take this level of business creating ability nationwide, we'll all be plucking chickens for a living.

Perot, H. Ross

13.

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.

14.

Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.

Kiam, Victor

15.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Baudelaire, Charles

16.

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

17.

Few great men could pass personal.

Goodman, Paul

18.

It is not the employer who pays wages -- he only handles the money. It is the product who pays the wages.

Ford, Henry

19.

As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth.

Hawken, Paul

20.

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

21.

If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don't wait for time.

Franklin, Benjamin

22.

When the product is right, you don't have to be a great marketer.

Iacocca, Lee

23.

Anything that you do to increase job security automatically does work for you. It makes your employees a closer part of the unit.

Smith, Roger

24.

Get the best people and train them well.

Merrill, Charles

25.

When you are skinning your customers you should leave some skin on to grow again so that you can skin them again.

Khrushchev, Nikita

26.

You can't run a business or anything else on a theory.

Geneen, Harold S.

27.

Don't try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. This can't be done, except by liars.

Baruch, Bernard M.

28.

It is much more difficult to measure non-performance than performance. Performance stands out like a ton of diamonds. Non-performance can almost always be explained away.

Geneen, Harold S.

29.

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

Walton, Sam

30.

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

31.

I work in a strange business, and trust is a word that's not even in the vocabulary.

Basinger, Kim

32.

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

33.

You never really hear the truth from your subordinates until after 10 in the evening.

Jurgen Schrempp

34.

You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.

Ceo, Harold Geneen

35.

Corporations are social organizations, the theater in which men and women realize or fail to realize purposeful and productive lives.

Rena, Peter

36.

Business conventions are important because they demonstrate how many people a company can operate without.

37.

Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.

Trump, Donald

38.

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

Watson, Thomas J.

39.

Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards--and living up to them--is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.

Seth Godin

40.

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

Henderson, Bruce

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

Our planning system was dynamite when we first put it in. The thinking was fresh; the form mattered little. It was idea oriented. We then hired a head of planning, and he hired two vice presidents, and then he hired a planner; and the books got thicker, and the printing more sophisticated, and the covers got harder, and the drawings got better.

Welch, John

44.

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was business; but now when great fortunes are only made by business: Business is war!

Bovee, Christian Nevell

45.

HereÆs my theory about meetings and life; the three things you canÆt fake are erections, competence and creativity. ThatÆs why meetings become toxic they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes. One of the most common creativity-faking tactics is when someone puts their hands in prayer position and conceals their mouth while they nod at you and say,'Mmmmmm. Interesting.'If pressed, theyÆll add,'IÆll have to get back to you on that.'Then they donÆt say anything else.

Douglas Coupland

46.

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

Wang, An

47.

More business is lost every year through neglect than through any other cause.

Cathcart, Jim

48.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

Geneen, Harold S.

49.

Forty for you, sixty for me And equal partners we will be