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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:

Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day.

John Dryden Cymon and Iphigenia (1700)

Business strategy is a battle plan for a better future.

Patrick Dixon Building a Better Business (2005)

I think this is part of a process of delegitimising this sector and saying these are odious profits, this is not a legitimate business model.

Naomi Klein

People are not an interruption of our business. People are our business.

Walter Washington

Cockney artists profess to find the bourgeoisie dull; as if artists had any business to find anything dull.

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens (1906)

In business—every business—the bottom line is understanding the process. If you don't understand the process, you'll never reap the rewards of the process.

Donald Trump Trump: How to Get Rich (2004)

I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.]]

Margaret Thatcher

Tourism is an ugly business, it’s not fit work for human beings. It’s hosting parasites.

Kim Stanley Robinson Blue Mars (1996)

If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

Arthur Miller Collected Plays (1958)

On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.

Satoru Iwata

You cannot be pro-jobs and anti-business at the same time. You cannot love employment and hate employers.

Paul Tsongas

Be you not toys any longer! Stir up the wild business in you. You have to be real animals before you can be men.

R. A. Lafferty Space Chantey (1968)

One of the first things to be noted in business life is its imperialism. Business is exacting, engrossing, and inelastic.

Margaret Elizabeth Sangster Winsome Womanhood (1900)

That’s how business works. There’s always somebody coming in on your blind side.

Gregory Benford The Martian Race (1999)

A business tip, you never know who's having "pillow talk" with one another. Watch what u say, who u say it to, & WHO u talk about.

Keshia Chante Official Website (2009)

Some owners are competent, effective business people who care about the game. Many others do not share these attributes.

Andrew Zimbalist Baseball And Billions - Updated edition (1992)

This text is oriented toward human organizations since this has been the emphasis in the practice of O.R. in business and industry.

C. West Churchman Introduction to Operations Research (1957)

The artist's business requires his involvement in practically everything. He works in reference, not to a section of the world, but to the whole world.

Hans Haacke

His business is here, it is here that he is despised and vilified, it is here that he must carry out his undertaking

Jean-Paul Sartre Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

William Congreve The Double Dealer (1694)

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