Quotes from Stanley Bing

If you can listen well, people will say you're a good conversationalist.

I would love to have the power to stop waking at 3 a.m. every night to check my e-mail.

There are no living beings who exert more power over others, pound for pound, than tiny babies and extremely thin moguls.

There is no such thing as a merger. There are only buyers and sellers. Those who are bought are in danger when they have to bend over to pick up the soap. That's good to know.

The real Machiavellian, like the infant, believes there is nothing bigger or more important than him or herself. To succeed, you will need to achieve that view, to return to the liberating egocentrism of the selfish, amoral child who wants what he wants and permits nothing to get in its way.

Bill Clinton has perhaps been the most amazing practitioner of truth management in public life. He's had to be. Beset by enemies willing to use any tool to do him in, he let the truth out like a fly fisherman plays out a line, delicately, artfully, with infinite finesse, never emitting more truth than necessary, struggling mightily to tell us what he could without admitting defeat.

It depends on what your definition of 'is' is," he told his tormentors, and many Americans shook their heads in wonder, not only at the ridiculousness of the statement, but at the tenacity and toughness of a true Machiavelli who would not, could not, let his enemies use their version of the truth to defeat him.

During that time, the young man met and married a beautiful young woman who had completed her law degree from Columbia University but had decided to pursue her MBA afterward because she had no desire to practice law. Who does? Still, they were happy.

It is believed that Revson is the author of the oft-quoted statement, uttered during one long working weekend to his subordinates, "If you don't come in on Saturday, don't bother to come in on Sunday.

While in their conference room perusing some papers, he came upon a middle manager who was being yelled at by a senior vice president of finance. The poor man's shoulders were bent with anguish, his eyes were red and runny with sadness and humiliation, his hands shook, and he could scarcely raise his voice to defend himself.

The executives that ran Lehman Bros. into the ground several years ago had a macho culture that abhorred personal time. One executive was pressured to go to the office while his wife was actually delivering a baby.[18] Whether such assiduity resulted in a better work product has now been pretty definitively ascertained.

The beauty part of business warfare, unless your business is importing cocaine from Colombia or covering up a nuclear fuel spill in the Midwest, is that there is rarely any actual blood involved. Maybe that's why we can forgive Sun Tzu now and then for being such a careful sissy-boy. His guys were playing with live ammo, not cell phones and BlackBerrys.

In terms of their power over other adults, the sheer force of their monomaniacal self-interest and their utter lack of shame, they may be compared to only one other group of humans on the planet: babies.

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. The Three Slogans of the Party George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it." The quotation is from The Great Gatsby

Cows do not sell each other hay when they are hungry. Monkeys do not sell each other bananas. Only human beings can create the perception in other human beings that, even though they have showered, they still smell bad and need an underarm deodorant to set things right.

Because business, in many ways, is like politics or beauty pageants. The talented do, at times, rise to the top. But those with guts, gumption, unbounded energy, hot desire, and the ability to push people around do very well, too, even the ugly ones.

Are you willing to die for yourself? If you want to be, you have to be able to take the very first step toward attaining that capability. You have to be willing to live for yourself.

Clear spirits destroy karma. Brown spirits build karma.

The worst things are done not by people who believe they are doing wrong, but by those who are convinced that they walk with the hand of God on one shoulder.

The ways to find one's way to Enlightenment are many. There is prayer and fasting, and some try that to great effect, but that road is severe, particularly to people with electronic scheduling software and a lot of business lunches as part of the general requirements of their jobs, not to mention drinks after work, and pretty soon fasting, if not prayer, is out the window.

Fear is like fire. If you don't know how to handle it, it can kill you. But if you use it correctly, it can warm your house.

Elephants are therefore left only the option of being afraid of little things that sneak up and surprise them. Such things include mice, loud noises, spreadsheet surprises and sudden disappointments, food that is on the menu but unavailable, unannounced visitors, word of the displeasure of a higher executive, bad news about the effect of NutraSweet on the human kidney.

They were rocketing along a country lane where there was no cell phone service, propelled by the grouchy Mogul's constant, ill-tempered exhortations. "Faster!" yelled the Mogul, who was used to yelling at people he felt entitled to yell at. "I don't want to be late to this fucking thing!