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:

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

Barbara Tuchman A Distant Mirror (1978)

You have the magical combo of luck and sheer pigheadedness it takes to succeed in business.

Adam Rakunas Windswept (2015)

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

Eric Hoffer The True Believer (1951)

In all my years in business I can recall very few people I have wanted to fire for making mistakes.

Akio Morita Made in Japan (1986)

The true yield of business is determined less by the size of the estate than by the sum of the investment.

Albrecht Thaer Thaer cited in: Marion W. Gray (2000)

If you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work.

Michael E. Gerber Michael Gerber (1986)

I have featured and will always continue to feature my name prominently in all my enterprises.

Donald Trump

While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static.

Tom DeMarco Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (1987)

Business strategy should not be a grand and sweeping overview. It should be more like an under view, a peek beneath the covers to look in great detail at what is going on.

Richard Koch The 80/20 principle: the secret of achieving more with less (1999)

When it rains, you put up an umbrella. That is the secret of success in business and management.

Matsushita Konosuke

I don’t know any other business that tells you not to go in and buy their product.

Jack Valenti

Growth as a goal, to repeat, is delusion. William James, the American philosopher, talked of the "bitch goddess success." A philosopher of business today might well talk of the "bitch goddess growth."

Peter Drucker MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973)

Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur.

Jack Welch Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001)

The problem with managing either a business or a prison by periodic rather than continuous inspection is that the "variables" are likely to be seriously out of control before the discrepancy is noted.

Anthony Stafford Beer Management Science (1968)

Success in the long run has less to do with finding the best idea, organizational structure, or business model for an enterprise, than with discovering what matters to us as individuals.

Jerry I. Porras

Burton, though an infidel, made it his business to investigate thoroughly every religion. Know a man’s faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

Philip José Farmer To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971)

Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.

William McKinley

I could not riding out alone about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory because God would, by things that are not, bring to naught things that are.

Oliver Cromwell

It is the business of economists, not to tell us what to do, but show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles.

Joan Robinson Economic Philosophy (1962)

Business is the "art" of making money by selling things or services people want for more than their cost.

Patrick Dixon Building a Better Business (2005)

Related topics