Skip to content

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.

Random quote on Business

Most quoted on business:

In many matters of business, perhaps in most, a continuity of mediocrity is better than a hotch-potch of excellences.

Walter Bagehot The English Constitution (1894)

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.

Barack Obama

But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour.

Joan Robinson Contributions to Modern Economics (1978)

Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

War would have been a much simpler, easier business with politics out of the mix.

Harry Turtledove Southern Victory (1997)

Do not let anyone else run your business.

Benjamin Graham The Intelligent Investor (1973)

But the more pressing business is what feminists can do to prevent an alien culture of oppression from taking root in the West.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)

Business – the world's work – is the sale of lies:
Not goods, but trade-marks; and still more and more
In every branch becomes the sale of money.

John Davidson

For the last 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, "Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it."

David Pogue

Evolution can’t be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it’s a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn’t aim.

Robert Charles Wilson Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009)

When pleasure is made a business, it ceases to be pleasure.

John Lancaster Spalding Aphorisms and Reflections (1901)

Let us quickly be finished with the business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner.

Tim Powers Declare (2001)

Business is the real test of the moral life.

Ted Malloch Doing Virtuous Business (2011)

The business virtue par excellence is honesty—without it markets can’t long survive.

Ted Malloch Doing Virtuous Business (2011)

Profitability is the consequence of doing business in the right way, to honor God.

Ted Malloch Doing Virtuous Business (2011)

If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable.

Tim Flannery The Weather Makers (2005)

Deregulation has been, above all else, a means of reducing corporate business's accountability to the public.

Herbert Schiller Living In The Number One Country (2000)

The elephants fight but the rats go about their business.

Ian McDonald River of Gods (2006)

Having fun is a dismal business after you pass fifty.

E. W. Howe Country Town Sayings (1911)

Reasoning is a retrospective business—the judging of a present situation in the light of past experience.

John William Dunne An Experiment with Time (1927)

Related topics