Quotes from John Brooks

Before about 1800, only two important attempts were made to establish income taxes—one in Florence during the fifteenth century, and the other in France during the eighteenth.

Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because, where perspicacity is weakened, the most benevolent piece of advice can turn out badly.

Xerography is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a total revolution in this old sphere.

The one that's really new is the lowest-priced, too!" In the more rarefied sectors of Madison Avenue, a resort to rhymed slogans is usually regarded as an indication of artistic depravity induced by commercial necessity. From

While I can't conceive that this business will ever seem enough, an end of itself, to make up a satisfactory life, yet the busy-ness, the activity, the crises, the gambles, the management problems I must face, the judgment about people, all combine to make something far from dull.

the way stock prices are made, the silly and almost childlike basis upon which grown men decide that a stock should be bought, and at what price

McLuhan, for one, was convinced that all efforts to preserve the old forms of author protection represent backward thinking and are doomed to failure

The law in our time is, and probably ought to remain, almost unrealistically humanistic; in its eyes, corporations are people, stock exchanges are street-corner marketplaces where buyer and seller haggle face to face, and computers scarcely exist.

The Heart of Japan, Alexander Campbell reports that a large Japanese electrical concern has drawn up a list of seven company commandments (for example, "Be courteous and sincere!"), and that each morning, in each of its thirty factories, the workers are required to stand at attention and recite these in unison, and then to sing the company song (" For ever-increasing production/ Love your work, give your all!").

where perspicacity is weakened,

maybe it means that a time has come when—as in Elizabethan drama but seldom before in American business—failure can have a certain grandeur that success never knows.

Mrs. Davis raised a complaint about A.T. & T.'s contributions to charity, giving Mr. Kappel the opportunity to reply that he was glad the world contained people more charitable than she. (Tax-exempt applause.)

Saunders wound up his statement by laying down his terms: the Stock Exchange's deadline extension notwithstanding, he would expect settlement in full on all short stock by 3 P.M. the next day—Thursday—at $150 a share; thereafter his price would be $250.

For two decades, beginning in the early eighteen-seventies, the very thought of an income tax did not enter the American mind, apart from rare occasions when some Populist or Socialist agitator would propose the establishment of such a tax designed specifically to soak the urban rich.

But to enact an unsatisfactory law and then try to compensate for its shortcomings by good administration is, clearly, an absurd procedure.

A considerable percentage of these respondents [to a question about their ability to mix cocktails] are in the "somewhat" category on ability to mix cocktails.… Evidently, they do not have much confidence in their cocktail-mixing

With the exception of a general panic such as occurred in 1929, a corner is the most drastic and spectacular of all developments that can occur in the stock market, and more than once in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, corners had threatened to wreck the national economy.

peas in a pod.

Nathan Greene, special counsel to Lazard Frères, who was on the board for a while. Greene was a kind of business father confessor to me. I remember his saying, 'You think you'll make your pile and then be independent. My friend, in Wall Street you don't just win your independence at one stroke. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, you have to win your independence over again every day.' I found that he was right about that.

Most nineteenth-century American fortunes were enlarged by, if they were not actually founded on, the practice of insider trading,

Oddly, almost no one seems to have expressed gratitude to the British and American banks, which recouped something like half of their losses. It may be that people simply don't thank banks, except in television commercials.

correspondence

Various magazine articles have predicted nothing less than the disappearance of the book as it now exists, and pictured the library of the future as a sort of monster computer capable of storing and retrieving the contents of books electronically and xerographically.

version, though it fell somewhat short of the mood of, say, the last scene of "Die Meistersinger,