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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"Speculation is the romance of trade, and casts contempt upon on all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment."
"Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow, Ang'ring itself and others."
"O! that a man might know The end of this day's business, ere it come; But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known."
"Though inclination be as sharp as will, My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect."
"Good counselors lack no clients."
"In such business Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant More learned than the ears."
"I have always noticed that a man who gives the most for the money, gets the most business."
"I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable."
"We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?"
"It very seldom happens to a man that his business is his pleasure."
"There is no kind of idleness by which we are so easily seduced as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business."
"It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form... they shall do so under absolutely truthful representations... Great corporations exist only because they were created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions."
"When we control business in the public interest we are also bound to encourage it in the public interest or it will be a bad thing for everybody and worst of all for those on whose behalf the control is nominally exercised."
"The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business in the interest of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in my judgment, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed they would find that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural growth."
"The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace."
"In the future, it will become increasingly obvious that your competitors are just as clueless as you are."
"Your business clothes are naturally attracted to staining liquids. This attraction is strongest just before an important meeting."
"The manifesto of the dealmaker is simple: Reality is negotiable."
"In a world of free, everyone can play."
"As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring."
