Business Quotes

The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.

They can boo me, yell at me, and throw peanuts at me, as long as they pay to get in.

Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something.

There are only two things in a business that make money - innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.

I'm concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise. My dad taught me that when you borrow money it's the worst day of your life.

If you can't read the scoreboard. You don't know the score. If you don't know the score, you can't tell the winners from the losers.

You have to respect your parents. They are giving you an at-bat. If you're an entrepreneur and go into the family business, you want to grow fast. Patience is important. But respect the other party... My dad and I pulled it off because we really respect each other.

What people in business think they know about the customer and market is likely to be more wrong than right...the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.

Rivalry is the life of trade, and the death of the trader.

A company is known by the people it keeps.

The most important thing in the world for show business, really, you know everything's a high-tech business, but what people want now is what they can't get - exclusivity.

Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles.

I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.

Everything in life and business, you only earn more if you become more valuable. Because if you can do more for people than anybody else does, you can prosper. But you can't do that unless you're constantly educating yourself with the cutting edge. My whole life, even when I had no money, I would invest in education.

[We in Microsoft] are not the only software company but we are a great software company doing some unique work.

You have to be able to separate business from the love of the game. There were a lot of decisions made business-wise that I wasn't happy with, and I took a lot of blame over the years. But you have to be able to separate that from the love you have for the game.

It's lonely at the top - if you don't like that, then you don't start a company.

Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.

VaynerMedia filters the world how humans interact. This is how people are going to make buying decisions.

A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is. And lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you'll go out of business.

No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real.

We get paid for bringing value to the market place.

The most critical case in a corporation, especially a big one, is when everything goes well, when you have accomplished your objectives. When the temptation is to work twice as hard instead of saying, "We have accomplished our objectives, we have to think again."

... No one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year - if you check, you'll see that's more than most people make in a lifetime!

There are companies that are good at improving what they're already doing. There are companies that are good at extending what they're doing. And finally there are companies that are good at innovation. Every large company has to be able to do all three - improve, extend, and innovate - simultaneously.

Good service leads to multiple sales. If you take good care of your customers, they will open doors you could never open by yourself.

The business aspect is one of the most important things about having a music career, because every choice you make in a management meeting affects your life a year-and-a-half from now.

Art was always a means to an end with me. You get an idea, and you just can't wait. Once you've started, then you're in there with the punches flying. There's plenty of trouble, but you can handle it. You can't back out. It gets you down once in a while, but it's exciting. Our whole business is exciting.

Minicars produce miniprofits.

Let us, like merchants, show our foulest wares,And think perchance they'll sell; if not,The lustre of the better yet to showShall show the better.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

There was a time when corporations played a minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.

Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.

Great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.

The web is just going to be one more of those major change factors that businesses face every decade.

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

Business, that's easily defined - it's other people's money.

In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.

The customer’s always right.

I am far from underestimating the importance of dividends, but I rank dividends below human character.

In the army we are drilled into execution and then supervision, to make sure everything goes the way you planned it. But there is another thing that we do in the military, that I think perhaps isn't done enough in corporate life: As soon as you have made that decision, you start on the contingency planning. Because there is, as we like to say, a thinking, breathing enemy out there, who is not going to let you do just what you want.

The art of winning in business is in working hard - not taking things too seriously.

Industrial combination is not wrong in itself. The danger lies in taking government into partnership.

Take Wrigley's Chewing Gum. I don't think the Internet is going to change how people chew gum.

Making changes to better appeal to customer is INNOVATION.

Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.

We make our money out of our friends. Our enemies will not do business with us.

Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I've worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses.

There were a lot of missteps in the early days, but because we got in early we got to make more mistakes than other people.

The successful business executive can handle challenges and solve problems at a remarkable clip.

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

Mitch's Pizzaria... this week's coupon: unlimited free pizza. Special Note: coupon not good at any of the Mitch's Pizza locations. Free pizza oven with purchase of a small Coke. Two-for Tuesday: buy one pizza, get one franchise free.

A manufacturer is not through with his customer when a sale is completed. He has then only started with his customer.

The true business of every company is to make and keep customers.

I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever. Anything we can do to help newspapers find new ways of expression that will help them get paid, I am all for.

You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.

If you're trying to create a company, it's like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.

Thus, for those who are willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovation opportunity.

Each close you use should be an educational process by which you are able to raise the value in the prospect's mind.