Business Quotes

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
– V. S. Naipaul
The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.
– Doug Coupland
The real business of life is trying to understand each other.
– Gilbert Parker
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
– John Steinbeck
The Postal Service's unmatched ability to reach every household and business in America six days a week is a vital part of the nation's infrastructure.
– Joe Baca
The people who are competing business-wise out there want what other successful labels and artists have. I don't want what they have I want my own path, my own sound, my own identity. Record labels care nothing about identity or artistic freedom, they want good business.
– Joe Nichols
The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do.
– Paul Theroux
The owners don't win by having a lockout. Shutting down your business is not good for anybody and it's certainly not good for the players, it's certainly not good for the fans. And that's most important to us.
– Roger Goodell
The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.
– Twyla Tharp
The only thing harder than leaving show business is coming back.
– Dave Chappelle
The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.
– Tom Hanks
The nature of the global business environment guarantees that no matter how hard we work to create a stable and healthy organisation, our organisation will continue to experience dramatic changes far beyond our control.
– Margaret J. Wheatley
The music business is motivated by money. Music is motivated by energy and feelings.
– Erykah Badu
The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.
– Will Rogers
The movie business is a big gamble.
– Jackie Chan
The most important quality in a leader is that of being acknowledged as such. All leaders whose fitness is questioned are clearly lacking in force.
– Andre Maurois
The most important decision I've made in business? The choices of people I have around me. When I first started I brought everybody with me, my homies from the neighborhood, criminals. I just said, 'Come on everybody, we made it.' Then I had to realize we didn't make it. I made it.
– Snoop Dogg
The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.
– Meryl Streep
The monarchy is foremost a business, and it's important to them that the British public continue to finance the excessive luxurious lifestyles of the now quite enormous, wasteful and useless 'royal' family. I find it very sad.
– Steven Patrick Morrissey
The message I take all round the world is Britain is open for business.
– William Hague
The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.
– Napoleon Hill
The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
– Honore de Balzac
The leverage and influence social media gives citizens are rapidly spreading into the business world.
– Simon Mainwaring
The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out, starting with himself.
– Blaine Lee
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
– Clarence Darrow
The jewelry business is a very, very tough business - tougher than the computer business. You truly have to understand how to take care of your customers.
– Guy Kawasaki
The invisible hand of the market always moves faster and better than the heavy hand of government.
– Mitt Romney
The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we learn about the world and the way we conduct business.
– Ron Wyden
The Internet creates as well as destroys. Social networks, search advertising, and cloud computing are multibillion dollar industries that didn't exist 10 years ago. They are products of the same force that has rendered the Postal Service's core business obsolete.
– John Sununu
The hardest thing about being in this business is just being able to be yourself. People act like there's this one set of rules to follow to be a pop star and I think, 'Well, you say I'm a pop star, so maybe that's not true.'
– Kelly Clarkson
The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players.
– Blaine Lee
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.
– Thomas Frank
The Golden Rule finds no limit of application in business.
– James Cash Penney
The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
– William James
The goal seems to me at times just to be business first.
– Laura Linney
The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
– Walter Lippmann
The forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.
– William Graham Sumner
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
– Walter Lippmann
The duty of government is to leave commerce to its own capital and credit as well as all other branches of business, protecting all in their legal pursuits, granting exclusive privileges to none.
– Andrew Jackson
The desire to hit a big home run is dominating the music business.
– Billy Corgan
The death of any man aged 56 is very sad for his widow and family. And no one would deny that Steve Jobs was a brilliant and highly innovative technician, with great business flair and marketing ability.
– A. N. Wilson
The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'
– Jeff Bezos
The comic book world is a tough business.
– Shia LaBeouf
The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.
– Lyndon B. Johnson
The chances of a bank going out of business are extremely slim, but it's always a good idea to spread around major sums so every penny is backed by insurance.
– Suze Orman
The career stuff is for business people.
– Joseph Gordon-Levitt
The camera fails to capture the 'business' in show business! We typically will give 10 percent of our salary to the agent, 10 percent to the manager, and 5 percent to the lawyer, plus the publicist gets a flat fee, which needs to be budgeted for.
– Danica McKellar
The business of America is business.
– Calvin Coolidge
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
– T. S. Eliot
The business side of film has goofed up so many things, but even that's changing. It happened to the music industry and now it's happening to the film studios. It's crazy what's going on. But artists should have control of their work especially if, as I always say, you never turn down a good idea and never take a bad idea.
– David Lynch
The business is a very tricky obstacle course, and you should be very clear about work begetting work. If you're not working, you're not interesting.
– Elisabeth Rohm
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.
– Taylor Swift
The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks.
– Rupert Murdoch
The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.
– Russell Baker
The American formula for creating business is not to have the government create business.
– John Sununu
The 9-9-9 plan would resuscitate this economy because it replaces the outdated tax code that allows politicians to pick winners and losers, and to provide favors in the form of tax breaks, special exemptions and loopholes. It simplifies the code dramatically: 9% business flat tax, 9% personal flat tax, 9% sales tax.
– Herman Cain
That's why I do this music business thing, it's communication with people without having the extreme inconvenience of actually phoning anybody up.
– Steven Morrissey
That's what show business is, sincere insincerity.
– Benny Hill
That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story.
– Mitt Romney
Teenage girls these days are more and more getting lured into thinking they should dumb themselves down, and that's going to attract the wrong kind of guy, and it's serious. It's serious business.
– Danica McKellar
Teach your children how to behave with animals. Adopt a pet. Don't go buy one. Please. That's a sin. Let's get these puppy mills out of business.
– Shelley Morrison
Sweat equity is the most valuable equity there is. Know your business and industry better than anyone else in the world. Love what you do or don't do it.
– Mark Cuban
Suits are looked at more now as a business thing which is kind of a shame. If you're not wearing it just for work, you should try and trick it up a bit.
– Daniel Craig
Start with good people, lay out the rules, communicate with your employees, motivate them and reward them. If you do all those things effectively, you can't miss.
– Lee Iacocca
Sometimes I think our problems are made worse by the kind of business we're in. Playing these road shows is a weird experience.
– Loretta Lynn
Somebody has to tell the E.P.A. that we don't need you monkeying around and fiddling around and getting in our business with every kind of regulation you can dream up. You're doing nothing more than killing jobs. It's a cemetery for jobs at the E.P.A.
– Rick Perry
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
– Jonathan Sacks
Some people work hard in this business and become really popular, really big stars but they never receive an award from within the business. Somehow, when your colleagues and friends believe in you to the point of handing you an award it means so much more.
– Sharon Stone
Some people want fame, popularity and huge sales. I've always hoped to have a really long career. So I've tried to make each of my creative decisions and business decisions to allow for longevity. As a side effect I got really famous and really big. I didn't realize the two could go together.
– Jewel Kilcher
Some of the greatest actors have turned superheroes into a serious business: Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in 'Batman' Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, the first venerable knights of the X-Men, who have now passed the baton to Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy.
– Tom Hiddleston
So we really need jobs now. We have to take jobs away from other countries because other countries are taking our jobs. There is practically not a country that does business with the United States that isn't making - let's call it a very big profit. I mean China is going to make $300 billion on us at least this year.
– Donald Trump
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
– David Herbert Lawrence
So little done, so much to do.
– Cecil Rhodes
Show business has been really, really good to me because I can work and take a lot of time off, and I'm extremely undisciplined person.
– Meryl Streep
Show business is my life. When I was a kid I sold insurance, but nobody laughed.
– Don Rickles
Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.
– Jack Welch
Selling public property is the true Chicago way. Had Mr. Obama not been elected president, the nation's business journals would be falling over one another to praise his city for its daring, market-friendly innovations.
– Thomas Frank
Seems to me that this business, for actors anyway, is not so much about whether or not you do good work. It's about whether or not you get the chance to do good work.
– Hugh Laurie
Secure our borders first. Let us know and let us make sure the American people know that we're taking care of the important business of dealing with the illegal immigration into this country. You cannot begin to address the concerns of the people who are already here unless and until you have made certain that no more are coming in behind them.
– Michael Steele
Run a home like you would a small business and treat it with the same seriousness.
– Anthea Turner
Romney is right that the Obama vision is too centered on government. But his is too centered on the promotion of business and wealth creation at the expense of everything else.
– John Podhoretz
Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards.
– Thomas Friedman
Reason and judgment are the qualities of a leader.
– Cornelius Tacitus
Really, I have to laugh because there was a whole set of stories that made me sound like the Dragon Lady, you know, 'tough this and tough that.' Then there is this business about 'gooey.' The bottom line is I am a pragmatic idealist.
– Madeleine Albright
Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.
– James Buchan
Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.
– Bill Cosby
Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
Profit is the most global aspect of a business, and it is cross-functional.
– Carlos Ghosn
Profits in business always depend on the rate of interest: the higher the interest, the higher the rate of profit required.
– James Buchan
Positive thinking is the key to success in business, education, pro football, anything that you can mention. I go out there thinking that I'm going to complete every pass.
– Ron Jaworski
Politics is just show business for ugly people.
– Jay Leno
Politics are about preserving relationships at the end of the day, and it has nothing to do with the greater good for humanity. It's just all about business.
– will.i.am
Politicians also have a love affair with the 'small business exemption.' Too much paperwork? Too heavy a burden? Not enough time? Just exempt small businesses from the rule. It sounds so pro-growth. Instead it's an admission that the costs of a regulation just can't be justified.
– John Sununu
Planning cities is a necessary but risky business.
– Cate Blanchett
Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
– Colin Powell
Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.
– Marc Andreessen
Perhaps the most effective way to describe the approach a brand must take is to think of themselves as social cartographers. By that I mean that brands must simultaneously inspire, engage and maintain a series of conversations taking place within certain cultural landscape specific to their business goal.
– Simon Mainwaring
Performing doesn't turn me on. It's an egomaniac business, filled with prima donnas - including this one.
– Dan Rather
People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained.
– Jerome K. Jerome