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.
Every great man of business has got somewhere a touch of the idealist in him.
Business is a good game—lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.
Physicians attend to the business of physicians, and workmen handle the tools of workmen.
Curse on the man who business first designed,
And by't enthralled a freeborn lover's mind!
I see an entrepreneur as the chief designer of a business that works better than any other.
You foolish man, you don't even know your own foolish business.
Business is business. There is no special business for man or for woman.
I attend to the business of other people, having lost my own.