Timeless Wisdom Often Ignored
An anthology of the best quotes on business, leadership, investing, economics, fraud, failure, corporate folly and more
“My dream is that one day truly independent boards will tell top executives, “No, please don’t do that. You don’t want to end up in businessblunders.com.” – Al Lewis
When it comes to how to properly conduct yourself in business, there is truly nothing new under the sun.
From ancient philosophers to celebrity CEOs, humanity’s greatest minds have pretty much paved the road to a successful life. The trouble is that busy people get so caught up in their ambitions, they ignore this timeless wisdom and curry folly.
A tip from the past almost always seems to put the present into a clearer context. That’s why I am always looking for the best quotes for Business Blunders.
Here’s a curation of the greatest observations anyone has ever made business, leadership, management investing, economics, fraud, failure, corporate folly and more.
Have a read. Fill your soul with pithy wisdom. And if you have a favorite line that’s not in the collection, please add it to the comments.
The Best Quotes On Fraud
Warren Buffett:
“You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.”
Andy Griffith:
“Who is going to believe a con artist? Everyone, if she’s good.”
Richard Petty:
“If you ain’t trying to cheat a little, you ain’t likely to win much.”
Friedrich Nietzsche:
“If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.”
Honoré de Balzac:
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
“How fondly swindlers coddle their dupes!”
William Shakespeare:
“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”
Sophocles:
“Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.”
W.C. Fields:
“It’s morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.”
Willie Sutton:
“I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”
Homer Simpson:
“It takes two to lie: one to lie and one to listen.”
Aesop:
“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”
Edward Coke:
“Fraud and deceit abound in these days more than in former times.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”
The Best Quotes On Corruption
John Steinbeck:
“On all levels American society is rigged.”
Ralph Nader:
“The corporate crime wave has a new accomplice: The federal government.”
Alan Greenspan:
“Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. … What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.”
Frédéric Bastiat:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Abraham Lincoln:
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
Pope Francis:
“Corruption is paid for by the poor.”
Edward R. Murrow:
“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
Jonathan Swift:
“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.”
Bess Myerson:
“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.”
Adam Smith:
“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
Chuck Grassley:
“Going after waste, fraud, and abuse without whistleblowers is about as useful as harvesting acres of corn with a pair of rusty old scissors.”
Oscar Ameringer:
“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich.”
P.J. O’Rourke:
– “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
David Hume:
“The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.”
John Locke:
“Who lies for you will lie against you.”
The Best Quotes With Bad Predictions
Darryl Zanuck:
“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures.”
Dick Rowe:
“Guitar groups are on the way out.”
Robert Metcalfe:
“I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”
Paul Krugman:
“By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machines.”
Ken Olsen:
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Irving Fisher:
“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
The Best Quotes Containing Blunders
Jeff Bezos:
“I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this.”
Stockton Rush:
“You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed.”
Jeffrey Skilling:
“Well, thank you very much. We appreciate it … asshole.”
Dennis Kozlowski:
“I never thought that what I was doing was wrong.”
Lloyd Blankfein:
Just banker “doing God’s work.”
Adam Neumann:
“We are here to elevate the world’s consciousness.”
Alan Greenspan:
“I made a mistake.”
Elon Musk:
“Don’t advertise. … If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. … Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”
Ken Fisher:
“Money, sex, those are the two most private things for most people. … It’s like … going up to a woman in a bar and saying, hey I want to talk about what’s in your pants.”
Frank Abagnale
“Dear dad, you always told me that an honest man has nothing to fear, so I’m trying my best not to be afraid.”
The Best Quotes On Investing
Bernard Baruch:
“The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.”
Jason Zweig:
“I put two children through Harvard by trading options. Unfortunately, they were my broker’s children.”
John C. Bogle:
“The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.”
“Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.”
“If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn’t be in stocks.”
Jay Leno:
“The United States has developed a new weapon that destroys people but leaves buildings standing. It’s called the stock market.”
Mark Twain:
“October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.”
Eugene Fama:
“I’d compare stock pickers to astrologers, but I don’t want to bad mouth astrologers.”
Jesse Livermore:
“The stock market is never obvious. It is designed to fool most of the people most of the time.”
Nick Murray:
“There is no such thing as no-risk. There’s only a choice of what to risk, and when to risk it.”
Peter Bernstein:
“The market’s not a very accommodating machine; it won’t provide high returns just because you need them.”
Benjamin Graham:
“The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism and unjustified pessimism.”
Jeremy Siegel:
“Fear has a greater grasp on human action than does the impressive weight of historical evidence.”
Charlie Munger:
“The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting.”
Isaac Newton:
“I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”
George Goodman:
“If you don’t know who you are, the stock market is an expensive place to find out.”
Peter Lynch:
“Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.”
“Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections than in corrections themselves.”
Charles Dow:
“There is always a disposition in people’s minds to think that existing conditions will be permanent.”
Warren Buffett:
“Wall Street is the only place that people ride in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
William Feather:
“One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.”
John Maynard Keynes:
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
“There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.”
John Templeton:
“Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.”
Benjamin Graham:
“The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.”
Philip Fisher:
“I want companies that welcome dissent, rather than stifle it, that don’t penalize people who criticize what management is doing.”
Howard Marks:
“Never confuse brains with a bull market.”
Jesse Livermore:
“The market is never wrong – opinions often are.”
Howard Marks:
“Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.”
The Best Quotes On Economics
Adam Smith
“All money is a matter of belief.”
George Bernard Shaw:
“If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.”
Laurence J. Peter:
“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.”
Paul Samuelson:
“Economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions.”
John Kenneth Galbraith:
“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”
Marty Allen:
“The study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.”
Alfred A. Knopf:
“An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.”
John Kenneth Galbraith:
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
J. Frank Dobie:
“The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.”
Ernest Hemingway:
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war.”
Milton Friedman:
“Inflation is taxation without legislation.”
Sherlock Holmes:
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”
Edgar Fiedler:
“The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.”
Alfred North Whitehead:
“Civilizations advance by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.”
John Kenneth Galbraith:
“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
Charlie Munger:
“The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy.”
Bob Farrell:
“When all the experts agree, something else is going to happen.”
Humphrey B. Neill:
“When everybody thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong.”
Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level.”
Oscar Wilde:
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
The Best Quotes On Integrity
William Shakespeare:
“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”
Marcus Aurelis:
“Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.”
Oprah Winfrey:
“Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible.”
Bob Marley:
“The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.”
Mary Kay Ash:
“Honesty is the cornerstone of all success. Without honesty, confidence and ability to perform shall cease to exist.”
Elbert Hubbard:
“Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.”
Geoffrey Chaucer:
“The guilty think all talk is of themselves.”
Tom Peters:
“There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity.”
Thomas Paine:
“Character is much easier kept than recovered.”
Baltasar Gracián:
“One lie destroys a whole reputation of integrity.”
Samuel Johnson:
“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”
Warren Buffett:
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
Martin Luther King Jr.:
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
Henry Ford:
“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”
Frederick Douglass:
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
Nikki Giovanni:
“If now isn’t a good time for the truth, I don’t see when we’ll get to it.”
Martin Luther King:
“The time is always right to do what is right.”
Roberto Clemente:
“If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this earth.”
Harry S. Truman:
“The buck stops here.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt:
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Aristotle:
“Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.”
Jane Addams:
“Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.”
Fred Rogers:
“Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect. ”
The Best Quotes On Failure
Steven Wright:
“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.”
Bill Gates:
“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
Warren Buffett:
“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”
Carl Sagan:
“Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money”
Herman Melville:
“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
John Burroughs:
“A man may fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”
George Washington Carver:
“Ninety–nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.”
Henry Ford:
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
Sara Blakely:
“Failure is not trying.”
Nelson Mandela:
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
Epictetus:
“It is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
Arianna Huffington:
“We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes.”
Thomas Watson:
“The way to succeed is to double your error rate.”
John Kenneth Galbraith:
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”
Fred Allen:
“A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.”
The Best Quotes On Success
William Pollard:
“The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”
John F. Kennedy:
“Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”
Henry David Thoreau:
“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
Estée Lauder:
“I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.”
Sonia Sotomayor:
“Success is its own reward, but failure is a great teacher too, and not to be feared.”
Booker T. Washington:
“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.”
Coco Chanel:
“Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”
Andy Grove:
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
Dale Carnegie:
“Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.”
Charles Darwin:
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
The Best Quotes On Reality Checks
Steve Case:
“A vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.”
Steve Jobs:
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me.”
Nelson Mandela:
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Søren Kierkegaard:
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Seneca:
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Woody Allen:
“Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”
Shakespeare:
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
Carl Jung:
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
J.P. Morgan:
“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”
H.L. Mencken:
“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
James Allen:
“Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.”
Niccolo Machiavelli:
“The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.”
Lin Yutang:
“When small men cast big shadows, it means the sun is setting.”
Winston Churchill:
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
Bertrand Russell:
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Jim Collins:
“Arrogance destroys the very thing it seeks to build.”
Richard Feynman:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Demosthenes:
“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
Edward R. Murrow:
“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”
Warren Buffett:
“In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”
Albert Einstein:
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Philip Tetlock:
“Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it.”
Herbert Simon:
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
H.L. Mencken:
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
Daniel Kahneman:
“Confidence is a feeling, not a calculation.”
The Best Quotes On Truth
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
Salman Rushdie:
“Our lives teach us who we are.”
Dorothy L. Sayers:
“The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.”
Gloria Steinem:
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
Voltaire:
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
Arthur Schopenhauer:
“Every truth passes through three stages: ridicule, violent opposition, and acceptance.”
Ida B. Wells:
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
Louis Brandeis:
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
Denis Diderot:
“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”
Sojourner Truth:
“Truth is powerful and it prevails.”
Tertullian:
“The first reaction to truth is hatred.”
Virginia Woolfe:
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
Pablo Picasso:
‘“We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.”
Georges Braque:
“Truth exists; only lies are invented.
The Best Quotes On Leadership
Rosalynn Carter:
“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they ought to be.”
Andrew Carnegie:
“No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.”
Niccolò Machiavelli:
“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”
Lee Iacocca:
“There’s a world of difference between a strong ego, which is essential, and a large ego, which can be destructive.”
Samuel Goldwyn:
“I don’t want yes–men around me. I want everyone to tell the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.”
Plato:
“He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.”
Benjamin Franklin:
“A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.”
Charles de Gaulle:
“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
Ralph Nader:
“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
Stephen Covey:
“What you do has far greater impact than what you say.”
Lao Tzu:
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves.”
The Best Quotes On Management
Peter Drucker:
“Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Sam Walton:
“There is only one boss: The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
J. Paul Getty:
“The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.”
Warren Buffett:
“In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
Michael Eisner:
“If you’re soft and fuzzy, like our little characters, you become the skinny kid on the beach, and people in this business don’t mind kicking sand in your face.”
John C. Maxwell:
“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”
Charlie Munger:
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”
John Kenneth Galbraith:
“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”
Thomas Sowell:
“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”
Isaac Asimov:
“The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.”
W. Edwards Deming:
“In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
Benjamin Graham:
“The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.”
Reed Hastings:
“Don’t tolerate brilliant jerks.”
Peter Drucker:
“Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.”
Steven Covey:
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
The Best Quotes Offering Career Advice
Bob Newhart:
“I worked in accounting for two and a half years... and decided I was just going to give comedy a try.”
Confucius:
“If you try to do too much, you will not achieve anything.”
Bruce Lee:
“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”
T.S. Eliot:
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
Bruce Lee:
“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”
George Carlin:
“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.”
Mark Twain:
“A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.”
Lane Kirkland:
“If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.”
Sun Tzu:
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”
Bertrand Russell:
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
Benjamin Franklin:
“Never ruin an apology with an excuse.”
Henry David Thoreau:
“The true price of anything you do is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
Somerset Maugham:
“People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.”
Warren Buffett:
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”
Toni Morrison:
“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
Gabriel García Márquez:
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old; they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
Indra Nooyi:
“There is nothing like a concrete life plan to weigh you down.”
Warren Buffett:
“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
Muriel Siebert:
“You create opportunities by performing, not complaining.”
Hillary Clinton:
“Take criticism seriously, but not personally.”
Booker T. Washington:
“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.”
Socrates:
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
The Best Quotes On Corporate Responsibility
Colonel Sanders:
“Feed the poor and get rich or feed the rich and get poor.”
Charles Pickering:
“Media corporations have a civic responsibility not only to prevent fraud and financial abuse, but also to not corrupt or degrade our culture.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt:
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”
Walter Cronkite:
“America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”
George Bernard Shaw:
“We have no right to consume happiness without producing it.”
Ralph Nader:
“The life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.”
Dolores Huerta:
“We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things.”
Ben Horowitz:
“Take care of the people, the products, and the profits - in that order.”
Herb Kelleher:
“Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy.”
Steven Wright:
“99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.”
The Best Quotes On Ambition
Joseph Stilwell:
“The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind.”
Abraham Lincoln:
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
Edmund Burke:
“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”
T.S. Eliot:
“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”
William Shakespeare:
“Nothing is so common as the wish to be remarkable.”
Elvis Presley:
“Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.”
Baruch Spinoza:
“Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.”
Robert Frost:
“By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.”
The Best Quotes On Debt
Gordon Bethune:
“A bankruptcy judge can fix your balance sheet, but he cannot fix your company.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.”
“A man in debt is so far a slave.”
Publilius Syrus:
“Debt is the slavery of the free.”
Benjamin Franklin:
“Creditors have better memories than debtors.”
Joseph E. Stiglitz:
“Anybody who knows about capitalism knows that bankruptcy is an essential part of capitalism.”
John Maynard Keynes:
“If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.”
David Graber:
“As it turns out, we don’t ‘all’ have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.”
Noam Chomsky:
“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.”
Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld:
“It is no tragedy to do ungrateful people favors, but it is unbearable to be indebted to a scoundrel.”
The Best Quotes On Money
Mark Twain:
“A lack of money is the root of all evil.”
Benjamin Franklin:
“If you would like to know the value of money, try to borrow some.”
Bob Hope:
“A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove you don’t need it.”
Voltaire:
“When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Money often costs too much.”
Dorothy Parker:
“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
Spike Mulligan:
“Money can’t buy you happiness but it does bring a more pleasant form of misery.”
Leonardo da Vinci:
“He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.”
Epictetus:
“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
The Best Quotes On Bureaucracy
Clay Shirky:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Robert Conquest:
“Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.”
James C. Collins:
“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.”
George Bernard Shaw:
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”
Mahatma Gandhi:
“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation.”
Milton Berle:
“What is a committee? A group that keeps minutes and loses hours.”
Oscar Wilde:
“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”
Paul McNulty:
“If you think compliance is expensive, try non–compliance.”
Milton Friedman:
“Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.”
The Best Quotes On Monopolies
Peter Thiel:
“The people who have monopolies pretend not to have them, and the people who don’t have monopolies pretend to have them.”
Nancy Pearcey:
“Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity.”
Robert Anton Wilson:
“A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.”
Serj Tankian:
“If you allow for a purely capitalistic society, without any type of regulation at all, you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything, and then you'll have zero capitalism, zero competition – it would just be one giant company.”
Mario Puzo:
Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.”
Steve Balmer:
“We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.”
“I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.
Howard Hughes:
“We don't have a monopoly. Anyone who wants to dig a well without a Hughes bit can always use a pick and shovel.”
Rupert Murdoch:
“Monopoly is a terrible thing, till you have it.”
The Best Quotes On Taxes
Will Rogers:
“The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.”
“The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.”
Albert Einstein:
“The hardest thing in the world is to understand the income tax.”
Ernie Banks:
“When I wake up in the morning, I feel like a billionaire without paying taxes.”
Barry Goldwater:
“The income tax has created more criminals than any other single act of government.”
Winston Churchill:
“There’s no such thing as a good tax.”
John Marshall:
“The power to tax involves the power to destroy.”
Thomas Jefferson:
“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
Ronald Reagan:
“You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.”
David Mazzucchelli:
“Yes, here's to the founding fathers – slave-owners, British citizens who didn't want to pay taxes.”
HermanWouk:
“Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.”
Leona Helmsley:
“We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
The Best Quotes On Strategy
Mike Tyson:
“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”
Shirley Chisholm:
“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
Sun Tzu:
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
Winston Churchill:
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Michael Porter:
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Amelia Earhart:
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity.”
Eleanor Roosevelt:
“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.”
Margaret Thatcher:
“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”
Marie Curie:
“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”
James Baldwin:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Sun Tzu:
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war.”
Epictetus:
“No great thing is created suddenly.”
Seneca:
“If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.”
Martin Luther King:
“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”
David Packard:
“More businesses die from indigestion than starvation.”
Edward Abbey:
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Karl Marx:
“Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”
The Best Quotes On Ignorance
Aldous Huxley
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
H.L. Mencken:
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
Bertrand Russell:
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Julius Caesar:
“Men willingly believe what they wish.”
Lao Tau:
“Those who know do not boast. Those who boast do not know.”
Socrates:
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
Epictetus:
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
Charlie Munger:
“Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.”
William Osler:
“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.”
Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Clarence Darrow:
“History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history.”
Benjamin Franklin:
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
David Storey:
“The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.”
Charlie Munger:
“People calculate too much and think too little.”
“I just try and avoid being stupid.”
Albert Einstein:
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”
W. Edwards Deming:
“Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.”
B.F. Skinner:
“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”
Lou Holtz:
“The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.”
Miguel de Cervantes:
“Too much sanity may be madness.”
Winston Churchill:
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”
Baruch Spinoza:
“The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.”
The Best Quotes On Liberty
George Bernard Shaw:
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
Aristotle:
“The weak are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay no heed to either.”
José Martí:
“Only tyranny fears the full expression of liberty.”
“A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one’s self from the tyranny of any of them.”
“Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.”
“We are free, but not to be evil.”
Epictetus:
“No man is free who is not master of himself.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
“No man is more hopelessly enslaved than the man who falsely believes he is free.”
Audre Lorde:
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
The Best Quotes On Autocracy
Alice Walker:
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Ida B. Wells:
“One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”
Toni Morrison:
“If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.”
Frederick Douglass:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
Stephen King:
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
J. Paul Getty:
“The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.”
Audre Lorde:
“We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.”
Harvey Milk:
“Hope will never be silent.”
Noam Chomsky:
“Under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.”
The Best Quotes Offering Inspiration
Marie Curie:
“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
Anaïs Nin:
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe:
“The longest day must have its close.”
Golda Meir:
“Don’t be humble. You’re not that great.”
Mae West:
“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”
Edith Wharton:
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
Anne Frank:
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
Florence Nightingale:
“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.”
Gabriel García Márquez:
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
George Bernard Shaw:
“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”
Eleanor Roosevelt:
“A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.”
The Best Quotes On Marketing
Jeff Bezos:
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
Bill Gates:
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
John D. Rockeller:
“Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.”
Sinclair Lewis:
“Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.”
James Altucher:
“The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.”
Roy H. Williams:
“In marketing you must choose between boredom, shouting and seduction. Which do you want?”
Sheryl Crow:
“That feeling of freedom, open highways of possibilities, has kind of been lost to materialism and marketing.”
Fred Allen:
“An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.”
Louis Kronenberger:
“The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.”
Avinash Kaushik:
“Never let ads write checks your website can't cash.”
"Democracy is all very well, so long as we do not give it to the People." -- Audrey Forbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born
"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus." - Turkish Proverb
"Good governors do not consider their people their prey." -- Cato's Letters