Quotes About Business

The most common cause of low prices is pessimism—some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.

Cash, though, is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent.

The men whom I have seen succeed best in life have always been cheerful and hopeful men, who went about their business with a smile on their faces, and took the changes and chances of this mortal life like men, facing rough and smooth alike as it came.

If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. —Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13, 2012

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

Regardless what you do or what business you're in, time is more often than not your fiercest competitor.

Though her husband often went on business trips, she hated to be left alone. "I've solved your problem," he said. "I've bought you a St. Bernard. Its name is Great Reluctance. Now, when I go away, you shall know that I am leaving you with Great Reluctance!" She hit him with a waffle iron.

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.

When I see a merchant overpolite to his customers, begging them to taste a little brandy and throwing half his goods on the counter—thinks I, that man has an ax to grind.

But, like the man in the song, Alfred Roberts did well by doing good. The shop prospered.

Government gets involved in whom a business may hire, how much it pays, and the benefits it provides. The government may make it next to impossible to fire someone without risking a lawsuit.

On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife's religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need for some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.

Pride goeth before a fall, gentlemen. So in closin', I jest want to say that in life, or in any profession or business, it ain't how or where you start that counts - it's where you finish.

If I had learned anything after years in the business, it was how little I could ever know about what the market would do tomorrow.

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface...

We both (Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett) insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.

I think that, every time you see the word EBITDA, you should substitute the words "bullshit earnings.

We both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think. So Warren and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business.

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties.

My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with a blank sheet of graph paper.

AMAZONGOOGLEFACE ANNOUNCES INTENT TO ACQUIRE DISNEYAPPLESOFT The deal would result in a combined company worth approximately $97.3 quadrillion. "This will be good for consumers," said Jeff Bezos, CEO of AmazonGoogleFace, speaking from the company's offices on an icy dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt.

Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. Numbers sanctify.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can't help it. It's the truth.

The trouble with movies as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it's a business.