Business quotes
3.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside business — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"I have pledged - to you, the rating agencies and myself - to always run Berkshire with more than ample cash. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits."
"Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful."
"Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, 'Too much of a good thing can be wonderful'."
"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."
"In business for yourself, not by yourself."
"We few. We happy few. We band of brothers, for he today That sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother."
"To business that we love we rise betime, and go to't with delight."
"Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men."
"I have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty, and business liberty, and every other kind of liberty, in the phrase that is common in the sporting world, 'A free field and no favor.'"
"My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and discuss with absolute frankness."
"Business today consists in persuading crowds."
"Those who oppose all reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism."
"The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green."
"Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. The small landowners are the most precious part of a state"
"On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe."
"People rarely buy what they need. They buy what they want."
"Playing safe is very risky."
"Lack of resources (payroll), time and competing priorities are why so many nonprofits haven't done well. It's that simple."
"A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men..."
"We may be very busy, we may be very 'efficient', but we will also be truly 'effective' only when we begin with the end in mind."
