Quotes from John Brooks

In industry, you take a bump now and then, but you bounce back as long as you don't get defeated inside.

The button waiting to be pushed, the whir of action, the neat reproduction dropping into the tray—all this adds up to a heady experience, and the neophyte operator of a copier feels an impulse to copy all the papers in his pockets. And once one has used a copier, one tends to be hooked.

The Edsel was a classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time. It was also a prime example of the limitations of market research, with its 'depth interviews' and 'motivational' mumbo-jumbo.

Furthermore, I found it seductive. In fact, I was in danger of becoming a slave. Business has its man-eating side, and part of the man-eating side is that it's so absorbing.

Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing, because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher,

The expectation of an event creates a much deeper impression … than the event itself."—de la Vega.)

expectation of an event creates a much deeper impression … than the event itself."—de la Vega.)

Paradoxical as it may seem, the evolution of our income tax has been from a low-rate tax relying for revenue on the high income group to a high-rate tax relying on the middle and lower-middle income groups.

The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, contemplating the communication problem in a nonindustrial context, has said, "Actually, the breakdown is between the person and himself. If you're not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?

Before 1900, very few new income taxes appear to have been enacted anywhere without the stimulus of a war.

The role of the hero was filled, surprisingly, by the most frightening of untested forces in the market—the mutual funds.

when the role of dissenter is left to the Fool, there may be trouble ahead for everybody.

Business people who are otherwise meticulous in their observance of the law seem to regard copyright infringement about as seriously as they regard jaywalking.

all this is quite a ways from auto makers being able to rig markets or force consumers to take what they want them to take . And the reason ; simply ; is that there is no accounting for tastes .... when it comes to dictating , the consumer is the dictator without peer

Evidence that people are selling stocks at a time when they ought to be eating lunch is always regarded as a serious matter.

largest tax

In the law of torts there is the maxim: Every dog has one free bite.

voluntary compliance," to strive for agreeable, or at least not disagreeable, relations with the taxpaying public, and so on. He is a less gregarious and a more reflective man than Caplin, however, and this difference has had

And then, to top off the joke, if that is what it is, there are the people with more income than anyone else who pay less tax than anyone else—that is, those with annual incomes of a million dollars or more who manage to find perfectly legal ways of paying no income tax at all.

On the contrary, a press conference is perhaps the only kind of show whose success is in direct proportion to the number of people who leave before it is over.

The upshot of the distinctions [making business travel & entertainment tax-deductible] is to put a direct premium on the habit— which some people have considered all too prevalent for many years anyhow— of talking business at all hours of the day and night, and in all kinds of company.

A margin call is a demand for additional collateral from a customer who has borrowed money from his broker to buy stocks and whose stocks are now worth barely enough to cover the loan.

In the United States it is comparatively easy to raise tax rates and to introduce tax-avoidance devices, and it is comparatively hard to lower tax rates and to eliminate tax-avoidance devices.

action, it would result in rigidity and certainty of interpretation, and would make it much easier for tax practitioners like me to manipulate the law to their clients' advantage. The