Business Quotes

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.
– Hunter S. Thompson
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
If you don't do it excellently, don't do it at all. Because if it's not excellent, it won't be profitable or fun, and if you're not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?
– Robert Townsend
I have made the tough decisions, always with an eye toward the bottom line. Perhaps it's time America was run like a business.
– Donald Trump
I didn't get here for my acting... but I love show business.
– Ted Turner
Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.
– Mark Twain
I don't want to spend so much time obsessing about myself. I love to cook and I love to eat. And yet, if I am not careful, I could be considered chubby in the film business. That's why it is great for me not to live in Hollywood. I love to go to the country where I can wear my pajamas all day long if I want.
– Liv Tyler
If football taught me anything about business, it is that you win the game one play at a time.
– Fran Tarkenton
God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else. It would be an awfully boring world.
– A. Alfred Taubman
The weird thing about this business - and I'm sure this operates in many other things, but it's very present and acute in this business - is that a lot of people don't realize that they have power. Particularly actors.
– Lili Taylor
People expect a certain reaction from a business, and when you pleasantly exceed those expectations, you've somehow passed an important psychological threshold.
– Richard Thalheimer
One of the reasons I got into this business is because I was a jack-of-all-trades. When I wa in school, I was the singer, the dancer, member of the track team, and a cheerleader.
– Michelle Thomas
Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.
– Stewart L. Udall
Winning in my business is everything.
– Al Unser
Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.
– Ludwig von Mises
I don't know any other business that tells you not to go in and buy their product.
– Jack Valenti
Now that women are jockeys, baseball umpires, atomic scientists, and business executives, maybe someday they can master parallel parking.
– Bill Vaughan
You know, there's a big lie in this business. The lie is that it's okay to go out in flames. But that doesn't do anybody much good. I may be wrong, but I think Hendrix was trying to come around.
– Stevie Ray Vaughan
Now that women are jockeys, baseball umpires, atomic scientists, and business executives, maybe someday they can master parallel parking.
– Bill Vaughn
It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community.
– Thorstein Veblen
I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul.
– Conrad Veidt
I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.
– Leonardo da Vinci
The United Nations has no business in our elections.
– David Vitter
ISC remains deeply apologetic that prior versions of BIND did not properly catch the configuration error that you appear to have built your business on.
– Paul Vixie
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.
– Sam Walton
There's a lot more business out there in small town America than I ever dreamed of.
– Sam Walton
I used to be in the real estate business, and I have three areas of interest: Chickamauga Lock, Chickamauga Lock, and Chickamauga Lock.
– Zack Wamp
You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.
– An Wang
After twenty years in business, I understand the importance of low taxes - but also of investing for the future.
– Mark Warner
When I finished school, I took my entire life savings - $5,000 - and invested it in a business. I was young. I was inexperienced. But I was an entrepreneur, and I was proud. And in six weeks, I was broke.
– Mark Warner
Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive.
– George Washington
Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.
– Thomas J. Watson
Good design is good business.
– Thomas J. Watson
Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.
– Thomas J. Watson
You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.
– Jessamyn West
Mix with your grave designs a little pleasure; Each day of business has its hour of leisure.
– Gilbert West
Oh, if people only knew how this business has grown.
– Pearl White
It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
– Alfred North Whitehead
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.
– Walt Whitman
I'm temperamentally suited to the business of acting. I'm quite fatalistic. If it's not happening, it's not happening, and there's very little you can do.
– Tom Wilkinson
Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.
– George F. Will
If I err, I err on the side of believing this is a serious business. Frankly, I think there's too much talk about 'style.'
– Brian Williams
I just don't want to be in this business anymore, Williams told the paper. I was never strong enough to not play football, but I'm strong enough now. I've considered everything about this. Everyone has thrown every possible scenario at me about why I shouldn't do this, but they're in denial. I'm happy with my decision. I'm finally free. I can't remember ever being this happy.
– Ricky Williams
Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.
– Woodrow Wilson
The thing about being an actor is that you're in the business of not growing up. I never had to say to myself, OK now, I've got to grow up and work for a bank, or go and sell real estate. I never had to make that kind of break.
– Luke Wilson
I had been playing for about a year and a half when the Beach Boys formed. When our folks went to Mexico on business, we would take the food money they had left us and we would rent instruments.
– Carl Wilson
I don't know that I had any particular influence, but when I came into the business my idols were people like John Ford and Willy Wyler and Howard Hawkes, later on Joseph Mankiewicz and others like that. But I don't know that I picked up, necessarily, anything. Of course Orson was a big influence.
– Robert Wise
I'm definitely happy with the way my career has gone, the success; but I even feel glad that I've experienced some failure in my life. That gives you perspective and humility about this business; it's good to realize that you're always just one movie away from not being in Vogue anymore.
– Reese Witherspoon
No matter what it is, if you get 10 people in the business talking about something, you get 10 different opinions, but you know, they're amazingly well informed.
– James Woods
You know, my business is now basically run by the marketing department. And most of these kids running the marketing department have their MBAs from somewhere and the extent of their film knowledge goes back to The Matrix. I mean, you mention Billy Wilder and they think you're talking about a place where you're going into a rave or something.
– James Woods
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
– Virginia Woolf
That space between the white lines, that's my office. That's where I conduct my business.
– Early Wynn
It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.
– John Wanamaker
After starting her career as a beauty queen on the fleshy fringes of show business, Imelda grew into bigger roles, playing Jackie to her husband's Jack, Bonnie to his Clyde, Evita to his strongman.
– Russell Watson
Whenever an individual or business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.
– Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
Well, all these stars have their houses swept quite regularly by people who work in the surveillance security business. They come in and they look for bugs and things.
– Peter Weir
All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guess what was at the other side of the hill'.
– Duke of Wellington
I have always noticed that a man who gives the most for the money, gets the most business.
– Vash Young
If I have my way, I'm going to dissolve the Forest Service. They're in the business of harvesting trees and they're not harvesting trees, so why have them anymore?
– Don Young
It is not the crook in modern business that we fear, but the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.
– Owen D. Young
The world does not owe men a living, but business, if it is to fulfill its ideal, owes men an opportunity to earn a living.
– Owen D. Young
Personal feelings should not enter into business-getting the job done is all that interests the boss.
– Loretta Young
You know when there's a star, like in show business, the star has her name in lights on the marquee! Right? And the star gets the money because the people come to see the star, right? Well, I'm the star, and all of you are in the chorus.
– Babe Didrikson Zaharias
I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can't truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.
– Zig Ziglar
For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis -- an American decision that this is sport, or that it is business.
– D. W. Brogan
Remember that you are an actor in a play and the playwright chooses the manner of it...your business is to act the character that is given you and act it well; the choice of the cast is another's…
– Epictetus
Good-morrow to thee; welcome:
Thou look'st like him that knows a warlike charge:
To business that we love we rise betime,
And go to't with delight.
– William Shakespeare
There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
– John Swinton
You ask about the important things to keep in mind: same as ever, with a task-based twist: what are the users trying to accomplish, what does the business need them to successfully accomplish, and what will the technology allow? If you can balance these three forces, you'll have a solid product.
– Christina Wodtke
'Whom are you?' he asked, for he had attended business college.
– George Ade
The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.
– Irving Berlin
We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It's a messy business, life. It's hard to figure--full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.
– Henry Bromel
When you are eight years old, nothing is any of your business.
– Lenny Bruce
Boxing is just show business with blood.
– Frank Bruno
I'm going to stay in show business until I'm the last one left.
– George Burns
I have found adventure in flying, in world travel, in business, and even close at hand... Adventure is a state of mind - and spirit.
– Jacqueline Cochran
The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.
– Confucius
Business? It's quite simple. It's other people's money.
– Alexandre Dumas
What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.
– Epictetus
Drive thy business or it will drive thee.
– Benjamin Franklin
Haste in every business brings failures.
– Herodotus
Never fear the want of business. A man who qualifies himself well for his calling, never fails of employment.
– Thomas Jefferson
There's this big pie in show business, and you physically can't eat the whole pie. If you give everybody a slice of pie, you will still have more than enough. The real trick is not to try to get the whole pie, but to keep the biggest slice.
– Jay Leno
Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.
– Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Talk of nothing but business, and dispatch that business quickly.
– Aldus Manutius
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
– H. L. Mencken
Eat and drink with your relatives; do business with strangers.
– Greek Proverb
A great preservative against angry and mutinous thoughts, and all impatience and quarreling, is to have some great business and interest in your mind, which, like a sponge shall suck up your attention and keep you from brooding over what displeases you.
– Joseph Rickaby
Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you're not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.
– David Rockefeller
A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?
– Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
Every man has business and desire,
Such as it is.
– William Shakespeare
O that a man might know the end of this day's business ere it come!
– William Shakespeare
In this business you either sink or swim or you don't.
– David Smith
Engineering is the science of economy, of conserving the energy, kinetic and potential, provided and stored up by nature for the use of man. It is the business of engineering to utilize this energy to the best advantage, so that there may be the least possible waste.
– William A. Smith
It is said that if Noah's ark had had to be built by a company; they would not have laid the keel yet; and it may be so. What is many men's business is nobody's business. The greatest things are accomplished by individual men.
– Charles Haddon Spurgeon
A dinner lubricates business.
– Lord William Stowell
It's a dangerous business going out your front door.
– J. R. R. Tolkien
No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.
– Thorstein Veblen
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
– William Wrigley Jr.
It violates right order whenever capital so employees the working or wage-earning classes as to divert business and economic activity entirely to its own arbitrary will and advantage without, the social character of economic life, social justice, and the common good.
– Pope Pius XI