Quotes from David Rockefeller

The Christian ethic played an essential part in my upbringing.

Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you're not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.

Whatever you do, if you do it hard enough you'll enjoy it. The important thing is to work and work hard.

Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work

It is true that I am often startled and even angered and repulsed by the strange directions and provocative content of new forms that seem to pop up every few months.

I think of art as the highest level of creativity. To me, it is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment.

The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.

When you have a lot of resources, the most important thing is to have had good parents and to have been brought up by people who gave one the proper values.

For more than 40 years, I have advocated the creation of a 'round the clock' community. This would mean, at the least, housing, schools and shops of various kinds alongside the commercial buildings. That kind of community had appeared in lower Manhattan in nascent form before Sept. 11, 2001.

I am never angry, although sometimes distressed.

I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one's life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.

When I see something I like, I buy it, but I do not look for it madly.

As children we recognized that we belonged to an unusual, even exceptional, family, but the effect was different on each of us.

Father was the eldest son and the heir apparent, and he set the standard for being a Rockefeller very high, so every achievement was taken for granted and perfection was the norm.

My grandfather, along with Carnegie, was a pioneer in philanthropy, which my father then practiced on a very large scale.

I was born into wealth and there was nothing I could do about it. It was there like food or air.