Quotes from J. Paul Getty

Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.

To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business.

I buy when other people are selling.

Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?

My father said: You must never try to make all the money that's in a deal. Let the other fellow make some money too, because if you have a reputation for always making all the money, you won't have many deals.

No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or get rich in business by being a conformist.

The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might of the force of habit and must understand that practices are what create habits. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.

There are always opportunities through which businessmen can profit handsomely if they will only recognize and seize them.

If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.

The conformist is not born. He is made. I believe the brainwashing process begins in the schools and colleges.

In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.

There is, however, hope for any person who wants to remain an individual. He can assert himself and refuse to conform. He'll be on his own, that's true, but while he will not have the security enjoyed by those who do conform, there will be no limits to what he may achieve.

The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.

It has always been my contention that an individual who can be relied upon to be himself and to be honest unto himself can be relied upon in every other way.

Formula for Success- Rise Early, Work Hard, Strike Oil

There is obviously something wrong with our educational system. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there might even be something wrong with at least some of our schoolteachers. But heaven help anyone daring to express such heretical views.

It shouldn't be very difficult for anyone to resist the temptation to force himself into the pattern of the structured man. One needs only to remember that a groove may be safe--but that, as one wears away at it, the groove becomes first a rut and finally a grave.

The majority is by no means omniscient just because it is the majority. In fact, I've found that the line which divides majority opinion from mass hysteria is often so fine as to be virtually invisible.

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor.

The man who comes up with a means for doing or producing anything better, faster or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips.

There are one hundred men seeking security to one able man who is willing to risk his fortune.

In some respects, a society in which the members reach a universal level in which they are anonymous drones by choice is even more frightening than one in which they are forced to be so against their will. When human beings relinquish their individuality and identity of their own volition, they are also relinquishing their claim to being human.

Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.

In business, as in politics, it is never easy to go against the beliefs and attitudes held by the majority. The businessman who moves counter to the tide of prevailing opinion must expect to be obstructed, derided and damned.