Quotes from John Brooks

The Edsel was obviously jinxed, but to say that it was jinxed by its design alone would be an oversimplification, as it would be to say that it was jinxed by an excess of motivational research.

It soon became evident, though, that public sympathy was one thing and public willingness to translate sympathy into cash was quite another.

Usually it is not until there is evidence that the employee [who has changed jobs] has not lived up to his contract, expressed or implied, to maintain secrecy, that the former employer can take action. In the law of torts there is the maxim: Every dog has one free bite. A dog cannot be presumed to be vicious until he has proved that he is by biting someone. As with a dog, the former employer may have to wait for a former employee to commit some overt act before he can act.

The danger in ingenious hardware is that it distracts attention from education. What good is a wonderful machine if you don't know what to put on it?

London gold dealers, in describing the day's action [during the 1968 gold crisis], used the un-British words "stampede," "catastrophe," and "nightmare.

individual investors, as opposed to institutional ones, which is to say people who would be described anywhere but on Wall Street as private individuals—played an astonishingly large role in the whole affair, accounting for an unprecedented 56.8 per cent of the total volume.

there were, as had been feared, a large number of mutual-fund shareholders who demanded millions of dollars of their money in cash when the market crashed, but apparently the mutual funds had so much cash on hand that in most cases they could pay off their shareholders without selling substantial amounts of stock.

meetings. (There are few public documents more indiscreet than proxy statements, in which the precise private stockholdings of directors must be listed.)

To nations holding large amounts of that particular currency in their reserve vaults, the effects of the devaluation is the same as if the vaults had been burglarized.

think that people may be more careful for a year or two, and then we may see another speculative buildup followed by another crash, and so on until God makes people less greedy.

IN the calendar of American economic life, 1955 was the Year of the Automobile. That year, American automobile makers sold over seven million passenger cars, or over a million more than they had sold in any previous year. That year, General Motors easily sold the public $325 million worth of new common stock, and the stock market as a whole, led by the motors, gyrated upward so frantically that Congress investigated it.

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. Generally speaking, both represented efforts by grasping rulers to mulct their subjects.

The eighteenth-century French tax, in the words of the same authority, "soon became honeycombed with abuses" and degenerated into "a completely unequal and thoroughly arbitrary imposition upon the less well-to-do classes,

They knew all about the automotive casualties that had followed the Second World War—among them Crosley, which had given up altogether, and Kaiser Motors, which, though still alive in 1954, was breathing its last.

acquiring money for its own sake can become an addiction if you're not careful—

conclusions:

A luncheon guest at the Bank of France is generally told apologetically, "In the tradition of the bank, we serve only simple fare," but what follows is a repast during which the constant discussion of vintages makes any discussion of banking awkward, if not impossible, and at which the tradition of simplicity is honored, apparently, by the serving of only one wine before the cognac.

January 18, 1953: I am now definitely committed [to Minerals & Chemicals] for not less than three more years … and morally committed to see the thing through. 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.

Failure can have a certain grandeur that success never knows