Business quotes
3.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside business — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The challenge here is to design a system where market incentives, including profits and recognition, drive those principles to do more for the poor. I like to call this idea creative capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities."
"We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism-if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. ... You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer."
"It had more layers than an onion. These writers meant business. There was a level for everybody. Your major could be celestial mechanics, and there'd be celestial-mechanics jokes."
"Those who manage their way into a crisis are not necessarily the right people to manage their way out of a crisis"
"Nothing in the world makes people so afraid as the influence of independent-minded people."
"The gratitude that we encounter helps us believe in the goodness of the world, and strengthens us thereby to do what's good."
"Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something."
"I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public."
"I support transitioning from the progressive tax to a flat tax system - both individual and corporate/business."
"Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax-deductible."
"Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary but does not enrich or ennoble a human life."
"Virtue is more clearly shown in the performance of fine ACTIONS than in the non-performance of base ones."
"A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem."
"The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work."
"If you have enough people sitting around telling you you're wonderful, then you start believing you're fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!"
"To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men."
"Money doesn't excite me - my ideas excite me."
"We grew to our present size almost against ourselves. It was not a deliberately planned commercial venture in the sense that I sat down and said that we were going to make ourselves into a huge financial octopus. We evolved by necessity. We did not sit down and say to ourselves, 'How can we make a big pile of dough?' It just happened."
"I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible, because dreams offer too little collateral."
"If you want your business to survive for 100 years, you've got to make it through every single day for 100 years. It's not enough to do it 99.9% of the time."
