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Business Quotes

Most of the names at the top of this page are working executives and entrepreneurs, Strive Masiyiwa, Barbara Corcoran and Peter Drucker among them. The older sourced material is better. Izaak Walton, in The Compleat Angler (1653), says he has laid aside business and gone a-fishing, and also that what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business. Thoreau, in Life Without Principle (1863), thought nothing, not even crime, was more opposed to poetry and philosophy than incessant business.

“The business of business is business” is attributed to both Milton Friedman and Alfred P. Sloan, and it is marked disputed for both. The line about corporations having no body to be kicked and no soul to be damned is credited to Lord Thurlow and is disputed too. The notes cite a 1981 Michigan Law Review article that takes its title from it.

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Most quoted on business:

A business man once stated that there is nothing so practical as a good theory.

Kurt Lewin

People don’t mind poking into other people’s business—they just don’t want other people poking into theirs.

Ryk E. Spoor Grand Central Arena (2010)

Over the long haul of life on this planet it is the ecologists — and not the bookkeepers of business — who are the ultimate accountants.

Stewart Udall

For me, religion is serious business—a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.

Katha Pollitt

Do I do business with Canadian racketeers? I don't even know what street Canada is on.

Al Capone Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada (2009)

You get paranoid in this business. But maybe paranoids get that way because of all the people out to get them.

Glen Cook Bitter Gold Hearts (1988)

We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers.

Theodore Roosevelt

War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst.

Carl von Clausewitz On War (1832)

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned.

Woodrow Wilson

For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business.

Joseph C. Wilson What I Didn't Find in Africa (2003)

We too should be about our father's business —
O Christ, hear us!

Dinah Craik Thirty Years, Being Poems New and Old (1880)

There is a complete lack of reference to business profits or loss in any of the cuneiform tablets that have been so far translated.

Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Resistance is, therefore, the business of aristocracies.

Bertrand de Jouvenel On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

I want to stress that for the vast majority of the people of this country, we should be going about our business as usual.

Boris Johnson

There is nothing more requisite in business than dispatch.

Joseph Addison The Drummer (1716)

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world.

Miguel de Cervantes El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha) (1605)

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America, Volume II (1840)

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Let never the gems of business be mixed with the jewels of pleasure.

Fritz Leiber Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1939)

My rule always was to do the business of the day in the day.

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington (1886)

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