The Quote Garden ™

I dig old books. ™

Est. 1998
Quotations about Business
CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for securing individual profit without individual responsibility. ~Ambrose Bierce
No matter what your business may be, if you are an employer, you will find that no investment you can make will pay you so well as the effort to scatter heart sunshine through your establishment... Many business men are beginning to discover that it pays not only to make employees comfortable but happy... Men can produce more; they are more efficient, they do their best work when happiest. Our mental attitude has everything to do with our productiveness. ~Orison Swett Marden, The Joys of Living, 1913
Blessed are the Price-Makers, for they shall inherit the earth. ~Gideon Wurdz (Charles Wayland Towne), "Standard Oil Maxims," Foolish Finance, 1905
"What makes a Merchant, Man of Trade?"
"Not Selling Wares, but Getting Paid!"
~Arthur Guiterman, "Of Merchants," A Poet's Proverbs, 1924
In the fable the wolf called the ox a robber. In the modern version they get together and form a trust. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1903, George Horace Lorimer, editor
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business. ~Henry David Thoreau
[M]y mother was a shy, frightened soul like myself; she did not realize that a successful career consists in impressing oneself upon people. A much larger percentage of men would succeed in business if they realized this truth as boys. The preliminary training in personal contact ought to take precedence over algebraic equations. ~Edward Mott Woolley, "Adventures in Business: The Merchant Who Needed a Press Agent," in The Saturday Evening Post, 1912 September 21st #networking
The trouble with a lot of merchants lies in their wild yearning to steal somebody's copyright. ~Edward Mott Woolley, "Adventures in Business: The Merchant Who Needed a Press Agent," in The Saturday Evening Post, 1912 September 21st
If the ancient person who had too many irons in the fire lived to-day he would probably organize them into a steel trust. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1903, George Horace Lorimer, editor
When persons, having business with you, offer to feast you, beware of them. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882 [Vendor lunches! —tg]
[A]nd now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it. ~Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, 1719
How can any undervalue business-habits? as if anything could be done without them. ~Florence Nightingale, "Una and the Lion," in Good Words, 1868
Here was a lesson in economics. And economics is simply the science of business, and business is the science of human service. ~Elbert Hubbard, "Let Thrift Be Your Ruling Habit," Loyalty in Business and One and Twenty Other Good Things, 1921
Don't say it, write it. You can't file a conversation. ~Business saying, quoted in Industrial Productivity, Industrial Relations Research Association, 1951
Christmas cards prove that if there is much sentiment in business, there is even more business in sentiment. ~20,000 Quips & Quotes by Evan Esar, 1968
Science and the classics of education are not rivals. Science and invention must not be slighted. Newton, Faraday, Kelvin, Bessemer, and Siemens are just as great as a corresponding number of your foremost scholars. It is not a question whether scientific education or a study in the humanities develops the highest type of man. It is a question what type of man is now needed to keep each country abreast of its competitors, especially in manufacturing... Business is neither classics nor science. The study of human nature, I think, is the best education for any business man... But whichever education a young man chooses, he should not remain long at college if he wishes to pursue a business career. All my brilliant partners have begun hard practical work in their teens. A course at a modern university will not teach a young fellow to be as successful a business man as if he had been sent into business in a subordinate capacity. This is not disparaging university education, for I limit the observation to the business career. ~Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) [modified —tg]
Big business don't go broke any more. The minute it looks bad for them, they combine with something else and issue more stock. ~Will Rogers (1879–1935)
We are living in an age of "Mergers" and "Combines." When your business is not doing good you combine with something and sell more stock. ~Will Rogers, 1930
Every corporation has a complaint process that begins with someone telling you that you are the first person to ever complain about this. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Work as if you own the company and soon you just might. ~Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife, tweet
You may find men who will become famous as specialists in many branches of life, especially in the professions. Great talents in one line will atone for the lack of many other qualities. But in the business career there must, I think, be an all-roundness to secure success. The decisions a business man is called upon to make every day, sometimes every hour, are momentous, and involve many interests. His judgment needs to be sure upon a wide range of subjects. ~Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. ~H. L. Mencken
A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour. ~Elbert Hubbard, 1909
A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. ~Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long, 1973
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. ~Ambrose Bierce
LADY FREDERICK BEROLLES. Then let me give you one warning — don't gamble.
MADAME CLAUDE. Oh, no, my lady. I gamble quite enough in my business as it is. I never know when my customers will pay their bills — if ever.
~W. Somerset Maugham, Lady Frederick, 1907
Every one contributes some special quality to the general whole. They naturally serve each other. I do not believe any one man can make a great success of a business nowadays. I am sure I never could have done so without my partners, of whom I had thirty-two, the brightest and cleverest young fellows in the world. I have often said that if I had to lose all the capital I had in the works or lose my partners, I should let all my capital go and start again without a dollar, but with the organization intact... No man will make a great business who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit of doing it. That spirit is fatal and a sure proof of a small mind. ~Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)
To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger. ~Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden, 1899, translated from the French by Alvah C. Bessie, 1931
But the wisest policy that an employer can pursue toward his men is to show by his actions that he has a heart. In cases of accident, distress, or any trouble, the firm should show that its heart has been touched, and that it can be generous and benevolent. The firm that has a reputation for taking the best care of its men has the best chance of success, because the best men... will gravitate to that firm and stay with it. Nothing pays so well in business as generous treatment. Indeed, the firm which sees that its men make the highest earnings is certain to be the most successful. ~Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)
Advice to big business: Don't buy the patent; hire the guy who got it. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
The trouble with not being into social networking is that people think you're anti-social when you're only anti-networking. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
He had been, until today, a mere business machine, which worked automatically, and made money, and was not grateful for the making of it, but took it as a right... ~F. W. Robinson, The Wrong That Was Done, 1891
I believe firmly in youths as executive agents. Older heads should be reserved for counsel. It is astonishing what a young man can do if he is only trusted... There should be no promotion of outsiders over the heads of aspiring young men. The employer who has not made the material around him fit for promotion will not be found to be much of a captain of industry. If the employer is indispensable to the young man the young man can soon make himself indispensable to his employer. ~Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)
A business corporation is a living organism, which is dynamic, not static, as long as it is doing business. It is managed by living men whose abilities differ as human nature does and whose ambitions, motives, methods and decisions are not automatic, but human. ~I. Edwin Tanenbaum and Linhart Stearns, Common Sense on Common Stocks, 1934
...a corporation is a living organism: that like a human being it goes through the three stages of life — youth with its strength; maturity; and thereafter, unless there is constant replenishment of vitality, the period of decline, and eventually the graveyard. ~A. B. ZuTavern and A. E. Bullock, The Consumer Investigates, 1947
Our client — the modern corporation — is a living organism. It gets born... it matures... it grows. At every stage, it is nourished on money. ~Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, 1958
A real merger is only for two souls with but a single thought. Corporations have no souls. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1904, George Horace Lorimer, editor
COMMERCE, n.. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's World Book, 1906
PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it. ~Ambrose Bierce
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Last saved 2025 Jan 11 Sat 20:32 CST
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