Quotes about business
page 23

“Real success in business is to be found in achievements comparable rather with those of the artist or the scientist, of the inventor or statesman. And the joys sought in the profession of business must be like their joys and not the mere vulgar satisfaction which is experienced in the acquisition of money, in the exercise of power or in the frivolous pleasure of mere winning.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

"Business — The New Profession", La Follette's Weekly Magazine, Volume 4, No. 47 (November 23, 1912), p. 7.
Extra-judicial writings

Money, Pleasure, Exercises, Success

“The brokerage and mutual fund business form a financial colossus that bestrides modern financial, and increasingly, social and political life.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Introduction, p. xii.
The Four Pillars of Investing (2002)

Life

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

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 115

Pleasure

“It's easy to rib Microsoft for copying Apple, and seeing the two stores side by side does make Team Redmond look a bit pathetic. But in business, losing face isn't as important as making money. And after visiting a couple Microsoft stores, I'm convinced they'll help Microsoft bring in more cash.”

Farhad Manjoo (1978) American journalist

Welcome to the Microsoft Store http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/04/microsoft_store_it_s_a_blatant_rip_off_of_the_apple_store_and_it_just_might_save_the_company_.html in Slate (25 April 2012)

Money, Help

“Do you consider, my dear maggotty sir [cosy-name for his friend], what a deal of work history pictures require to what little dirty subjects of coal horses and jackasses and such figures as I fill up with; no, you don't consider anything about that part of the story... But to be serious (as I know you love to be), do you really think that a regular composition in the Landskip [landscape] way should ever be filled with History, or any figures but such as fill a place (I won't say stop a gap) or create a little business for the eye to be drawn from the trees in order to return to them with more glee.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote from Gainsborough's letter to his friend William Jackson of Exeter, from Bath 23 Aug. 1767; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 379 (Appendix A - Letter I) 1755 - 1769

Love, Way, History, Thinking

“The Vedic tradition advises people to be busy with themselves, that is, their own moral and spiritual improvement. Several disciplines have been evolved for this purpose tapas (austerity), yoga (meditation), jñAna (reflection), bhakti (devotion), etc. A seeker can take to (adhikAra) whichever discipline suits his adhAra (stage of moral-spiritual preparation). There is no uniform prescription for everybody, no coercion or allurement into a belief system, and no regimentation for aggression against others. The Biblical tradition, on the other hand, teaches people to be busy with others. One is supposed to have become a superior human being as soon as one confesses the ‘only true faith’. Thenceforward one stands qualified to ‘save’ others.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Vindicated by Time: The Niyogi Committee Report (1998)

People, Faith

“We--by whom I mean anyone over sixty--commit two offenses just bu existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk to slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drugs barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas

"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish", p. 315 (Nook edition)
Cloud Atlas (2004)

World

“By Jesus’s time the Law of Moses, originally established for the government of a semi-barbarous nation of herdsmen and hill-farmers, resembled a petulant great-grandfather who tries to govern a family business from his sick-bed in the chimney-corner, unaware of the changes that have taken place in the world since he was able to get about: his authority must not be questioned, yet his orders, since no longer relevant, must be reinterpreted in another sense, if the business is not to go bankrupt. When the old man says, for instance: “It is time for the women to grind their lapfuls of millet in the querns,” this is taken to mean: “It is time to send the sacks of wheat to the water-mill.””

Robert Graves book King Jesus

Source: King Jesus (1946), Ch. 21.

Women, World, Family, Law

“The content of his theology was that there was a supreme being who had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one was a Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven…. Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good — kept him in touch with higher things.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

~ Ch. 16
Babbitt (1922)

Religion, Time, Perfection

“The purpose of this book is to show how economic analysis can be used in formulating business policies. It is therefore a departure from the main stream of economic writings on the theory of the firm, much of which is too simple in its assumptions and too complicated in its logical development to be managerially useful. The big gap between the problems of logic that intrigue economic theorists and the problems of policy that plague practical management needs to be bridged in order to give executives access to the practical contributions that economic thinking can make to top-management policies.”

Joel Dean (1906–1979) American economics wrtier

Preface
Managerial Economics, 1951

Books, Departure, Problem, Thinking

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

No known citation
Misattributed

Life, Wealth

“If I'd started in business thinking I knew everything, I'd have been sunk before I started… Never think of learning as being a burden or studying as being boring. It may require some discipline, but it can be an adventure. It can also prepare you for a new beginning.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education In Business and Life (2009), pp. 16–17
2000s, 2009

Thinking, Study, Learning

“KERRY: I have had conversations with leaders.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Recently?
KERRY: Yes, recently.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How recent?
KERRY: That‘s not your business. It‘s mine. Are you a Democrat, a Republican? What are you? Are you a registered Republican?
(CROSSTALK)
KERRY: Are you a Republican? You answer the question. Did you vote for George Bush? Did you vote for George Bush?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I voted for George Bush and I…
KERRY: Thank you.
(UNIDENTIFIED MALE sits while booed by crowd)”

John F. Kerry (1943) politician from the United States

March 2004 exchange
Quoted in

Question

“There is no more important object in nature, no object more worthy of contemplation, and if a famous philosopher and statesman of the past declares agriculture to be the worthy business of a free citizen (Cic. de off. I. 42.) it would also be an equally worthy business for him to get acquainted with the soil, without which agriculture is not conceivable.”

Friedrich Albert Fallou (1794–1877) German jurist and lawyer

Es giebt ja in der ganzen Natur keinen wichtigeren, keinen der Betrachtung würdigeren Gegenstand und wenn ein berühmter Philosoph und Staatsmann der Vorzeit (Cic. de off. I. 42.) den Ackerbau für das würdigste Geschäft eines freien Bürgers erklärt, so muß es auch ein ebenso würdiges Geschäft für ihn sein, sich mit dem Boden bekannt zu machen, ohne welchen kein Ackerbau denkbar. in Pedology or General and Special Soil Science Prospectus, Dresden 1862. http://books.google.com/books?id=ng8-AAAAcAAJ&pg=PP5. Translation by Google Translate Omnium autem rerum, ex quibus aliquid adquiritur, nihil est agri cultura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius. 'For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than agriculture' Cicero De officiis (On Dutiable Action). Book I, Section 42. Translation by Cyrus R. Edmonds (1873), p. 73

Nature, Past

“This is an industry, it's a business. We exist to make money. We exist to put commercials on the air. The programming that is put on between those commercials is simply the bait we put in the mousetrap.”

Ted Koppel (1940) television journalist

http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/tv/mmx-0511200452nov20,0,991635.story?coll=mmx-television_heds

Money

“I had anger but never hate. Before the war, I was too busy studying to hate. After the war, I thought, What's the use? To hate would be to reduce myself.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

Hate, War, Study, Anger

“Business cycles are a type of fluctuation found in the aggregate activity of nations that organize their work mainly in business enterprises: a cycle consists of expansions occurring at about the same time in many economic activities, followed by similarly general recessions, contractions, and revivals which merge into the expansion phase of the next cycle; this sequence of changes is recurrent but not periodic; in duration business cycles vary from more than one year to ten or twelve years; they are not divisible into shorter cycles of similar character with amplitudes approximating their own.”

Arthur F. Burns (1904–1987) American economist and diplomat

Arthur F. Burns and George W. Mitchell (1946). Measuring business cycles. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. p. 3; Cited in: Robert J. Gordon, ed. The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change, 1986. p. 2

Change, Time

“Just because Charlie and I can clearly see dramatic growth ahead for an industry does not mean we can judge what its profit margins and returns on capital will be as a host of competitors battle for supremacy. At Berkshire we will stick with businesses whose profit picture for decades to come seems reasonably predictable. Even then, we will make plenty of mistakes.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1994 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1994.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“A neutral observer would have no difficulty in identifying instances of disconnect between government and people, most obviously in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes where civil society’s voices are muzzled and where peaceful protests are prohibited or severely suppressed,24 but also to a lesser degree in democracies, particularly “representative democracies” that do not genuinely represent, business-driven democracies and so-called “lobby-democracies”, where elected officials tend to be more responsive to the lobbies than to the population.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf. 2013

People, Peace, Democracy

“The messages of the prophets are essentially indictments of Israel for breach of covenant. They preserved some memory of the old traditions, but were not so naive as to think that the literal demands of the old law would be adequate in their own times. There is no condemnation of the stratification of society as such, rather a condemnation of the injustice and extortion which was done by the powerful. To take a specific example, the old law knew as security for a loan only the pledge (Exod. 22:26). In a simple economy, loans were evidently of an amount which would usually be adequately secured by giving to the creditor some property to hold until the loan was repaid. In case of default, the debtor's property simply reverted to the creditor. No other form of security is presupposed in the Covenant Code, and it is specifically forbidden that an Israelite be a "creditor" to one of his fellows. Already in the reign of Saul the situation had changed, Those who gathered about David as outlaws included those who had "creditors" (I Sam. 22:2), and who therefore had to flee. Under the old pledge system of security there would be no possible occasion for flight from the community in case of default. A totally different legal doctrine had come into practice whereby the person of the debtor was security for a loan. Upon default the creditor could seize him (or his family) as a slave, possibly without any legal action at all. The only alternative to slavery would have been flight. This doctrine is identical to that of Babylonian law, and no doubt of the Canaanites as well. It is in the law of the monarchy that Canaanite influence is doubtless to be posited, but it is a legal tradition in total contradiction to the customs and morality of early Israel. Amos protested violently against the way the legal doctrine was practiced, as did most of the prophets (Am. 2:6; Hos. 12:8-9; Mic. 2:1-2). The later lawcodes illustrate beautifully the way in which the early traditions, and the needs of business were brought into harmony. The older pledge system was simply inadequate for a commercial economy; and if the person of the debtor was to be protected, so also must the rights of the creditor to some security for his loan to be guaranteed. Therefore, Deuteronomy and the Holiness Code (Lv. 17-26) accept the doctrine of bodily liability, but place restrictions upon the powers of the creditor over the defaulting debtor. In the Holiness Code he is not to be treated as a slave, nor given the legal status of a slave, but rather to be as a hired laborer.”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Law and Convenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (1954)

Family, Law, Way, Communication

“It was because of the general inclination, until very recently, to believe that art exists in art. At every opportunity, I've tried to correct that idea, suggesting that art is only a part – one of the elements that we live with... Being a painter, I probably take a painting more seriously than someone who drives a truck or something. Being a painter, I probably also take his truck more seriously. In the sense of looking at it and listening to it and comparing it to other trucks and having a sense of its relationship to the road and the sidewalk and the things around it and the driver himself. Observation and measure are my business.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

Art, Idea, Sense, Parting

“All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Journal entry (January 1819)

“From this perspective, the common experience of the fading of romance over time may have less to do with the inevitable undercutting of idealization by reality and familiarity than with the increasing danger of allowing oneself episodic, passionate idealization in a relationship that one depends on for security and predictability. Intense excitement about another is a dangerous business; it often is much safer to surrender to it with a person one cannot possibly spend much time with or will never see again. Sustaining desire for something important from someone important is the central danger of emotional life. What is so dangerous about desiring someone you have is that you can lose him or her. Desire for someone unknown and unobtainable operates as a defense against desire for someone known and obtainable, therefore capable of being lost.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Can Love Last? (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 114

Life, Reality, Passion, Time

“Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

People

“Like many New Englanders - he was a neighbor of Calvin Coolidge's in Northampton - he finds life a serious business. But he's never - well - heavy about it.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

about her husband, Dr. Francis Griffin Revealing The Life Of Irene Dunne, by Adele Whitely Fletcher; The Modern Screen (September 1933) http://www.irenedunnesite.com/press/modern-screen-september-1933/.

Life

“Somewhere in the past. organizations were quite simple, and 'doing business' consisted of buying raw material from suppliers, converting into products, and selling it to customers… For the most part owner-entrepreneurs founded such simple business and worked along with members of their families. The family-dominated business still accounts for a large portion of the business start today.”

R. Edward Freeman (1951) American academic

Source: Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, 2007, p. 5

Family, Past, Parting

“If you serve the business, it will serve you. Serve the business, serve the team.”

Jimmy John Liautaud (1964) Jimmy John's Owner, Founder, & Chairman

Interview with Franchise Times http://www.franchisetimes.com/April-2017/How-Jimmy-Johns-landed-FTs-deal-of-the-year/

“Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. This is how norms of rational thought are made effective… The answer to the question "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?"”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

is generally a scientific one.
Source: 2010s, The Moral Landscape (2010), p. 143–144

Question, Reality, Effort, Science

“One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work. That is why there is an enormous surge in the number of unpaid staff, volunteers. The needs are not going to go away. Business is not going to take up the slack, and government cannot.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

"New Priorities" Dancing Toward The Future, Context Institute http://www.context.org/, (1992) 1990s and later

Money, People, Education, Feeling

““We met five years ago.“ Jean scratched his beard. “On a sea voyage. We became business partners out of sheer boredom. Since then we‘ve been inseparable.“
“Except that my plan calls for me to be plotting your death.“
“Yes, but I don‘t know that, do I? Boon companion! I suspect nothing.“”

Scott Lynch book Red Seas Under Red Skies

“Chump! I can hardly wait to see you get yours!“
Reminiscence “Best-Laid Plans” section 1 (pp. 114-115)
Red Seas Under Red Skies (2007)

Death, Waiting, Sea

“Peter Drucker wasn’t exaggerating when he noted that the fate of advanced economies depends on making knowledge workers more productive. There is no business or economic issue that is more important to our long-term competitiveness and standard of living.”

Thomas H. Davenport (1954) American academic

Source: Thinking for a Living, 2005, p.208

Fate, Knowledge, Dependency

“Most often, our messing around and meddling in the affairs of other countries have unintended consequences. Sometimes just over in those countries that we mess with. We might support one faction, and it doesn't work, and it's used against us. But there's the blowback effect, that the CIA talks about, that it comes back to haunt us later on. For instance, a good example of this is what happened in 1953 when our government overthrew the Mossadegh government and we installed the Shah, in Iran. And for 25 years we had an authoritarian friend over there, and the people hated him, they finally overthrew him, and they've resented us ever since. That had a lot to do with the taking of the hostages in 1979, and for us to ignore that is to ignore history… Also we've antagonized the Iranians by supporting Saddam Hussein, encouraging him to invade Iran. Why wouldn't they be angry at us? But the on again off again thing is what bothers me the most. First we're an ally with Osama bin Laden, then he's our archenemy. Our CIA set up the madrasah schools, and paid money, to train radical Islamists, in Saudi Arabia, to fight communism… But now they've turned on us… Muslims and Arabs have long memories, Americans, unfortunately, have very short memories, and they don't remember our foreign policy that may have antagonized… The founders were absolutely right: stay out of the internal affairs of foreign nations, mind our own business, bring our troops home, and have a strong defense. I think our defense is weaker now than ever.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, Hate, People, School

“I think the knowledge about how legislation really affects small businesses is extremely valuable. If you haven’t run a small business, then you don’t have this kind of knowledge about how a regulation passed or taxes increased affects your bottom line. If you recognize that every new regulation takes that much more time to comply with, requires that many more employees, then it really gives you that foundational basis to make those decisions.”

Kristi Noem (1971) South Dakota politician

Miller, Emily. Rep. Kristi Noem: Head of the Class http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=41749, Human Events, February 14, 2011.

Knowledge, Thinking, Decision, Time

“Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness; the Outsider knows this; it is his business to sink claws of iron into life to grasp it tighter than the indifferent bourgeois, to build, to Will, in spite of the abyss.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis...

Life, Indifference

“It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.”

Alex Carey (1922–1988) Australian psychologist

Source: Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (1995), p. 21

Wisdom, Exercises, Sense, Change

“Innovative e-business projects start with a design of the e-business model. We often encounter the view, in research as well as industry practice, that an e-business model is similar to a business process model, and so can be specified using UML activity diagrams or Petri nets. In this paper, we explain why this is a misunderstanding. The root cause is that a business model is not about process but about value exchanged between actors. Failure to make this separation of concerns leads to poor business decision-making and inadequate business requirements.”

Hans van Vliet (1949) Dutch computer scientist

Jaap Gordijn, Hans Akkermans, and Hans Van Vliet. "Business modelling is not process modelling." International Conference on Conceptual Modeling. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2000. Abstract

Failure, Decision

“Organizational theories have three origins: Max Weber’s original work on bureaucracies which came to define the theory for sociologists, a line of theory based in business schools that had as its focus, the improvement of management control over the work process, and the industrial organization literature in economics. Unlike many fields in sociology, organizational theory has been a multidisciplinary affair since World War II, and it is difficult to understand its central debates without considering its linkages to business schools and economics departments.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: Organizations: Theoretical Debates and the Scope of Organizational Theory, 2001, p. 1

War, World, School, Literature

“Though I know something about British birds I should have been lost and confused among American birds, of which unhappily I know little or nothing. Colonel Roosevelt not only knew more about American birds than I did about British birds, but he knew about British birds also. What he had lacked was an opportunity of hearing their songs, and you cannot get a knowledge of the songs of birds in any other way than by listening to them.
We began our walk, and when a song was heard I told him the name of the bird. I noticed that as soon as I mentioned the name it was unnecessary to tell him more. He knew what the bird was like. It was not necessary for him to see it. He knew the kind of bird it was, its habits and appearance. He just wanted to complete his knowledge by hearing the song. He had, too, a very trained ear for bird songs, which cannot be acquired without having spent much time in listening to them. How he had found time in that busy life to acquire this knowledge so thoroughly it is almost impossible to imagine, but there the knowledge and training undoubtedly were. He had one of the most perfectly trained ears for bird songs that I have ever known, so that if three or four birds were singing together he would pick out their songs, distinguish each, and ask to be told each separate name; and when farther on we heard any bird for a second time, he would remember the song from the first telling and be able to name the bird himself.”

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862–1933) British Liberal statesman

Recreation (1919)

Life, Way, Imagination, Knowledge

“Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service…The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Source: Out Of The Crisis (1982), p. 99

Money, World, Problem, Thinking

“An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance… Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes"--he owes performance and nothing else. …. The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 229

Love, Change, Personality, Loyalty

“Good morning. This coming week I will be making the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to address a joint session of Congress. We have some business to attend to called the budget of the United States. The federal budget is a document about the size of a big city phone book, and about as hard to read from cover to cover. The blueprint I submit this week contains many numbers, but there is one that probably counts more than any other – $5.6 trillion. That is the surplus the federal government expects to collect over the next 10 years; money left over after we have met our obligations to Social Security, Medicare, health care, education, defense and other priorities. The plan I submit will fund our highest national priorities. Education gets the biggest percentage increase of any department in our federal government. We won't just spend more money on schools and education, we will spend it responsibly. We'll give states more freedom to decide what works. And as we give more to our schools we're going to expect more in return by requiring states and local jurisdictions to test every year. How else can we know whether schools are teaching and children are learning? Social Security and Medicare will get every dollar they need to meet their commitments. And every dollar of Social Security and Medicare tax revenue will be reserved for Social Security and Medicare.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Radio Address to the Nation (February 2001)

Money, Children, Health, Books

“But as Cowley was apt to be a little out of humour between whiles, let us hear the honourable, pious, and sweet-tempered Mr. Boyle, who, among the troubles of life, enumerates as one “the business of receiving senseless visits, whose continuance, if otherwise unavoidable, is capable, in my opinion, to justify the retiredness of a hermit.””

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, 1880

Life

“Let me tell you about what we call our field trips. It may surprise you to know, that I have personally visited, with many of my associates, practically every city in the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico. If any of you has done this, you realize what big a country it is. It has taken me weeks and weeks of the hardest kind of work and continual travel to accomplish this. I which that my duties were such that I could do more of it; and I am trying to arrange my affairs so that I can. On these trips I visit from five to ten dealers a day. I meet them in their own places of business, talk with them across their own desks and solicit from them suggestions and criticisms as to their relations with the Corporation; the character of the product; the Corporation's policies; the trend of consumer demand; their viewpoint as to the future, and many other things that such contact makes possible. I solicit criticism of anything and everything.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 343

Travel, Future, Personality, Country

“…he had found an image of one of the big Western-style business hotels along the waterfront: one of those places where it was possible to be a white person without attracting one’s own personal Stonehenge of cataleptic, openmouthed gapers.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Xiamen, Day 4
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

Personality

“We sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in their silos. Even now, we're standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive because we've declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies, more moral, more civilized. Our image is at stake, we insist.
But we didn't come this far because we are made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. Yes, that was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on, to grab this land from whomever, and we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
And so it goes with most great nation-states, which feeling guilty about their savage pasts, eventually civilize themselves out of business, and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry, up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.”

Paul Harvey (1918–2009) American broadcaster

Commenting on historical military and social policies, during his ABC News broadcast (23 June 2005); quoted in "Agression Dominates the Airwaves" by Saul Landau, at Transnational Institute (19 July 2005) http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=1859&username=guest@tni.org&password=9999&publish=Y.

Men, Way, Feeling, Decision

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

As quoted in An Enemy Called Average (1990) by John L. Mason, p. 55.
Date unknown

People, Motivational, Funny, Deep

“Prosperity may be found in small as in big business.”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

Fir Dores Fir Tzavoes, 1901. Alle Verk, iv. 237.

“Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Fools, Suicide

“In the real business of life no one troubles himself much about 'moral titles'. No one would dream of surrendering any practical security, for the advantages of which he is actually in possession, in deference of the a priori jurisprudence of a whole Academy of philosophers.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: Quarterly Review, 116, 1864, p. 263

Life, Dreams

“Teachers do not care…It is not because teachers are badly paid and the teachers are organized but they do not teach. If we don’t respect them it is because we see them doing other business than teaching.”

Ela Bhatt (1933) founder of the Self-Employed Women's Association of India (SEWA)

On the low social regard for teachers.[Ghate, Chetan title=The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy, http://books.google.com/books?id=kPYXpHSVbywC&pg=PA373, 13 March 2012, Oxford University Press, 978-0-19-973458-0, 373–]

Teachers

“If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Source: Letter to J.B.Sutton 30 October 1949

Life, People, Support, Thinking

“We may not be the center of the universe and the telos of evolution, but we are concrete embodiments of cosmic processes in their particular terrestrial variation. And, albeit accidentally, we did happen to evolve a most remarkable property: self -reflection. In virtue of this we may be among the very few species of natural systems in the universe which are able not only to sense the world and respond to it, but to know their own sensations and come to reasoned conclusions about the nature of the universe. To be a man is thus to have the almost unique opportunity of getting to know oneself and the world in which one lives. It is surely shortsighted to disregard this opportunity and confine oneself solely to the business of living. A failure to exploit our capability for rational knowledge is, moreover, contrary to the business of living.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 119.

World, Failure, Nature, Knowledge

“The new rules of competition require managers to start by asking what's important to their customers and where the company can make new money. Then, they need to reinvent their businesses to create the next profit zones.”

Adrian Slywotzky (1951) American economist

Attributed to Slywotzky and Morrison in: John A. Byrne (1998) " Go where the money is http://www.businessweek.com/1998/04/b3562033.htm" at businessweek.com. Jan. 15, 1998.

Money

“Women are in bondage; their clothes are a great hindrance to their engaging in any business which will make them pecuniarily independent, and since the soul of womanhood never can be queenly and noble so long as it must beg bread for its body, is it not better, even at the expense of a vast deal of annoyance, that they whose lives deserve respect and are greater than their garments should give an example by which woman may more easily work out her own emancipation?”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

Letter to Susan B. Anthony (1854); as quoted in The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898) by Ida Husted Harper.

Women, Soul, Clothes

“Trade unions, governments, business corporations, political parties, and the like are formal structures in the sense that they represent rationally ordered instruments for the achievement of stated goals.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Organization," 1948, p. 25

Sense

“The great requisite … for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Thought and Action" http://books.google.com/books?id=9NU3AAAAYAAJ&q=%22The+great+requisite%22+%22for+the+prosperous+management+of+ordinary+business+is+the+want+of+imagination%22&pg=PA241#v=onepage Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Imagination

“We all thought you such a daring romantic then, and so outspoken about all us more conventional souls! Remember what you used to say about the world of business? All toadying and chicanery, lean purses fawning on fat ones for favors? Were those not the days? How far we wander from our youthful views!”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 1, Chapter 3 (p. 32)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Youth, World, Soul

“We've already found a secret memo coming out of the Justice Department. They're now going to go after 12 new perversions, things like bestiality, polygamy, having sex with little boys and making that legal. Not only that, but they have a whole list of strategies to go after the churches, the pastors, and any businesses that tries to assert their religious liberty. This is coming and it's coming like a tidal wave.”

Tom DeLay (1947) American Republican politician

[2015-06-30, Steve Marlsberg Show, Newsmax TV, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZy8V7NAagQ], quoted in [2015-07-01, Tom DeLay Knows Of Secret DOJ Memo To Legalize '12 New Perversions,' Including Bestiality And Pedophilia, Kyle Mantyla, Right Wing Watch, 2015-07-03, http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/tom-delay-knows-secret-doj-memo-legalize-12-new-perversions-including-bestiality-and-pedophi]
2010s

Secret, Justice, Sex, Boy

“Life, he decided, was for living, not for having, and he wanted to experience every moment that he could. At the deepest level, he'd come to understand that life could end at any moment, and it was better to be happy than busy.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Micah Sparks, Chapter 17, p. 339
2000s, Three Weeks with My Brother (2004)

Life, Happiness, Understanding

“Duty is the great business of a sea officer; all private considerations must give way to it, however painful it may be.”

Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) Royal Navy Admiral

Letter to Frances Nisbet [citation needed]
1800s

Pain, Way, Sea

“It is possible to see Keynesian and Schumpeterian ideas as complementary. Keynes is about short-run economic fluctuations brought about by erratic variations in the willingness of investors and governments to spend; Schumpeter is about the long-run trajectory driven by the erratic march of technological progress. This complementarity only became clear later, after both men had died, when economic growth became an explicit objective of public policy and topic of systematic analysis. Schumpeter was left frustrated by the younger generation’s affinity for his rival. In any case, the “preliminary volume” never materialized.
The world turns. Today, some sixty years after their deaths, Schumpeter’s star probably outshines Keynes’s. The business cycle has receded in importance, partly because the large industrial economies have sprouted a more stable structure, and partly because the lessons that Keynes taught have been learned by central banks and finance ministries. Instead, long-term economic growth has moved to the top of the political and intellectual agenda, and that was Schumpeter’s topic. As Robert Lucas memorably put it, once you have begun to think about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else. It is a pity that troubled old Schumpeter did not live to see the triumph of his obsession.”

Robert Solow (1924) American economist

"Heavy Thinker" (2007)

Death, Men, World, Star

““It is the principle of Business, which is more fundamental than the law of gravity. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a housebuilding business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called ‘religion,’ and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that the religions sell, but I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. But I’ll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me almost exquisitely perverse.”
“What’s that?” Carmody asked.
“It’s the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is free. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, ‘Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.’ The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.”
“I think I see what you mean,” Carmody said.
“I’ve made it too complicated,” Maudsley said. “There’s a much simpler reason for avoiding religion.”
“What’s that?”
“Just consider its style—bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans—fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I can’t believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why should I go to a place that a God would not enter?””

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 13 (pp. 88-89)

Women, God, War, Peace

“The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.”

Archibald Macleish (1892–1982) American poet and Librarian of Congress

Art and Law, Riders on Earth (1978)

Life, Law, Sense, Time

“In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.”

Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts

Frank commenting on legislation to remove federal criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. CNN Newsroom : Rep. Barney Frank's Marijuana Bill http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0807/30/cnr.05.html (30 July 2008)]

People, Hurt

“In all cases, wherein the mind feels itself in danger of being confounded by variety, it is sure to rest upon a few strong points, or perhaps upon a single instance. Amongst a multitude of proofs, it is one that does the business. If we observe in any argument, that hardly two minds fix upon the same instance, the diversity of choice shows the strength of the argument, because it shows the number and competition of the examples. There is no subject in which the tendency to dwell upon select or single topics is so usual, because there is no subject, of which, in its full extent, the latitude is so great, as that of natural history applied to the proof of an intelligent Creator.”

William Paley (1743–1805) Christian apologist, natural theologian, utilitarian

Source: Natural Theology (1802), Ch. 27 : Conclusion.

Feeling, History, Intelligence, Nature

“In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it.”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

Interviewed by the Mirror before the EU referendum result http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nigel-farage-wants-second-referendum-7985017 (16 May 2016) 2016

Way

“In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was "with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful."”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The press was busy printing money.
Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter V, Of Paper, p. 54

Money, Appearance

“It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

"The Headmaster" in Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984)

God, Religion, Thinking, Personality

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

Michael E. Gerber (1936) American business writer

Michael Gerber (1986), E, Myth, cited in: Manager's magazine, 1986. p. 57

Understanding

“I was sitting in my suite one night after the show, and I looked out at the [Las Vegas] Strip and saw the huge neon billboard with my name on it, spelled out in those giant letters they use. Then I looked across the street at Caesars Palace and saw Frank Sinatra's name, in the same giant letters. And I said to myself, 'Face it, Anne; you're in the business.”

Anne Murray (1945) Canadian singer

On her popularity in Las Vegas, as quoted in "Anne Murray: Facing the Big Time Her Own Way", Section "Her Own Way", by George Anthony, Billboard, Oct 20, 1979

Night

“Those are useful games which exercise the hand and the eye at the same time, and thus do part of the business which the schoolmaster is too ignorant or too learned to do. Games are also played according to certain rules, and thus unruly boys are taught to respect order and discipline even in their play. I hope I shall be excused if I say that boys' play is sometimes the best thing that they do at school. But let there be reasonable limits to it. Moderation in all things is the golden precept; let there be excess in nothing, not even in book learning.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

Books, School, Hope, Exercises

“Once in place as control perspectives, they are widely shared ways of reducing complexity of the world. They come into the existence in a piecemeal fashion and are articulated by representatives of the largest, most successful firms. They are propagated by the business press and informal links between organizations and then are supported by those organizations and organizational fields.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 12

World, Way, Fashion, Support

“The Courts of law are not provided at the public expense, and were not intended by those who so provided them, for the settlement of any but differences which do arise in the ordinary course of business.”

Edward Hall Alderson (1787–1857) Lawyer and jurist

Brownlow v. Egerton (1854), 23 L. J. Rep. Part 5 (N. S.), Ch. 365.

Law

“Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Eye Appeal, p. 79-80
1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951)

Life, Guy

“For I find that even those that have sought knowledge for itself and not for benefit, or ostentation, or any practical enablement in the course of their life, have nevertheless propounded to themselves a wrong mark, namely, satisfaction, which men call truth, and not operation. For as in the courts and services of princes and states, it is a much easier matter to give satisfaction than to do the business; so in the inquiring of causes and reasons it is much easier to find out such causes as will satisfy the mind of man, and quiet objections, than such causes as will direct him and give him light to new experiences and inventions.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Source: Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603) Works, Vol. 1; The Works of Francis Bacon (1857) p. 232, https://books.google.com/books?id=HloJAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA232 Vol. 3.

Life, Men, Truth, Knowledge

“And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt. It has been thoughtfully observed that every nation, owing to its peculiar character and composition, has a definite mission in the world. What that mission is, and what policy is best adapted to assist in its fulfillment, is the business of its people and its statesmen to know, and knowing, to make a noble use of this knowledge. I need not stop here to name or describe the missions of other or more ancient nationalities. Our seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of government, world-embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is, to make us the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen. In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds. We are not only bound to this position by our organic structure and by our revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of our people. Gathered here from all quarters of the globe, by a common aspiration for national liberty as against caste, divine right govern and privileged classes, it would be unwise to be found fighting against ourselves and among ourselves, it would be unadvised to attempt to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or prescribe any on account of race, color or creed.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, World, Family, Faith

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

Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist

Source: Contributions to Modern Economics (1978), Chapter 5, The Rate of Interest, p. 46

“Manuel Mercado Acosta is an indio from the mountains of Durango. His father operated a mescal distillery before the revolutionaries drove him out. He met my mother while riding a motorcycle in El Paso. Juana Fierro Acosta is my mother. She could have been a singer in a Juarez cantina but instead decided to be Manuel’s wife because he had a slick mustache, a fast bike and promised to take her out of the slums across from the Rio Grande. She had only one demand in return for the two sons and three daughters she would bear him: “No handouts. No relief. I never want to be on welfare.” I doubt he really promised her anything in a very loud, clear voice. My father was a horsetrader even though he got rid of both the mustache and the bike when FDR drafted him, a wetback, into the U. S. Navy on June 22, 1943. He tried to get into the Marines, but when they found out he was a good swimmer and a non-citizen they put him in a sailor suit and made him drive a barge in Okinawa. We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in 100-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at 5:00 A. M. while he chopped the logs we’d hauled up from the river on the weekends.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 72.

Mountain, Water, Reading, Daughters

“In a sense, the American Dream was foreigners could come to this country and, through hard work, they could be successful, make a new start, and realise and fulfil their dream despite their caste or their religion in their homelands. So Trump erected a system that denies them all of that. A system that sets castes, restricts religion, prohibits foreigners, and breaks all of the groundwork for small business, and for them to be able to do anything.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

Religion, Dreams, Sense, Success

“In the case of a novel, or any imaginative work, especially if the tone is poetic, my own preference is for ending with a touch of symbolism which shall leave the reader brooding. A fine novel, a well-written story, "proves" nothing. Certain characters have played their parts, life goes on, and the final passage may be allowed to remain with one foot in the air, as is the case with some of Chopin's conclusions. But there is no absolute rule in such matters, and there are epic novelists who like to end on a powerful crescendo, as Ravel does in Bolero, or Dvorak in the New-World Symphony. Composition has features which are common to all the arts, and the author can learn as much about his business in the concert hall as in the library.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Life, World, Art, Imagination

“I’m gay. I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business … All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

As quoted in "Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are" by Patricia Cohen in The New York Times (9 September 2008)

Happiness, Thinking, Parent

“A fundamental part of any firm's corporate strategy is its choice of what portfolio of business to compete in. According to the academic literature, this decision should reflect the 'superiority' of related diversification over unrelated diversification… This is because related diversification presumably allows the corporate center to exploit the interrelationships that exist among its different businesses (SBUs) and so achieve cost and/or differentiation competitive advantages over its rivals.”

Constantinos C. Markides (1960) Cypriot business theorist

Source: "Related diversification, core competences and corporate performance", 1994, p. 149

Literature, Decision, Parting

“How nauseating in view of all this to see Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste, reduce this to a game of scrabble... to a matter of finding the right words. We now know that Fianna Fáil ministers see nothing wrong with a Minister for Finance taking large amounts of money for personal use from business interests as long as there is no proof that any specific favours were done.”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

Irish Independent http://www.independent.ie/national-news/higgins-lashes-nauseating-backtrack-by-pds-71587.html

Money, Game, Personality

“While growing your management skill…you set out to learn more about business. To grow yourself as a leader is a human thing. For that you must set out to learn more about humans, and yourself.”

Kent Thiry (1956) Business; CEO of DaVita

Vanderbilt Commencement Address (2011)

Learning

“Any form of organization that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results. In an era of accelerating change, organizations, and national economies, most likely to succeed are those with the ability to adjust and adapt. Robert H. Waterman Jr., … shows how and what this sort of innovation must become a way of life for business organizations across the board. What is needed is an environment that fosters the use of an ad-hoc problem-solving technique, in effect an -adhocracy- that functions outside the often initiative-stifling bureaucracy”

Robert H. Waterman (1950) American writer

Robert H. Waterman (1993), Adhocracy: The Power to Change. W.W. Norton ; Book summary

Life, Way, Problem, Change

“Business is the real test of the moral life.”

Ted Malloch (1952) American businessman

Source: Doing Virtuous Business (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 17.

Life

“The cosmic also keeps me busy, more than the other 'Nieuwe Vizie' ['New Vison'-artists]. For me it means the feeling of forces in nature like electricity, radio, radar, and of forces that one only suspects, and has not been able yet to track down scientifically.”

Roger Raveel (1921–2013) painter

version in original Flemish (citaat van Roger Raveel, in het Vlaams): Het kosmische houdt ook mij, wel het meest van De Nieuwe Vizie [-kunstenaars] bezig: het betekent voor mij een aanvoelen van krachten in de natuur als elektriciteit, radio, radar, en van krachten die men slechts vermoedt en wetenschappelijk nog niet heeft kunnen achterhalen. Quote of Raveel 1974, in the article 'Roger Raveel en zijn keuze uit het Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Gent' http://www.tento.be/sites/default/files/tijdschrift/pdf/OKV1975/Roger%20Raveel%20en%20zijn%20keuze%20uit%20het%20Museum%20voor%20Schone%20Kunsten%20in%20Gent.pdf, ed. Ludo Bekkers; in Dutch art-magazine 'Openbaar Kunstbezit', January-March 1975, p. 13 1970's

Feeling, Nature

“[On book reviewing] I will only turn down a book if I know I won't be able to muster enough interest to read the bloody thing. Or if I realize that I despise the author, and that I'm just going to become hysterical in my dispraise. A couple of times in my life I've disobeyed my own rule, and later regretted it. […] It's a delicate business. All too often, if one writes a favorable notice, it's seen as a product of the old-boy network, and if one dispraises a book, it's seen as envy. Nobody seems able to accept that I review books as a book reviewer, not as a competing novelist. When I review, I'm being as honest as I can. And I'm saying to the reading public — the minuscule segment of the reading public that reads reviews — that this is my judgment.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Life, Books, Boy, Time

“I am busy painting every day studies of the weavers here, which I think are technically better than the painted studies from Drenthe, which I sent you.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1880s, 1884 Source: Quote from Letter 355, from Nuenen The Netherlands, January 1884; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, page: Catalog: Dutch Period 2. - Weaver

Thinking, Study, Painting

“In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Source: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946), p. 42;

People, Democracy

“A breakdown of management into its basic functions — development, production and marketing — revealed that the character of the functions, their chronological sequence, the closeness with which they had to be integrated and their relative importance to the success and survival of the business, all depended upon the system of techniques in the firm concerned.”

Joan Woodward (1916–1971) British sociologist

Source: Management and technology, Problems of Progress Industry, 1958, p. 21-22

Success, Dependency

“The greatest business people I've met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.”

Michael E. Gerber (1936) American business writer

Source: The E-Myth Revisited, 1995, p. 5

People

“I always maintain that the great service that education renders to democracy is the same service that we hope to gain from religion. They work, or ought to work, hand in hand. It is to keep the moral weights and measures true to standard; and not only true to standard—true to the highest standard. And let us have that applied impartially to all classes of the community from the top to the bottom. There are those who would empty the conception of the state of all moral qualities, and they would confine education to a bread-and-butter business. If I may paraphrase Nurse Cavell's dying words, such patriotism is not enough. Moral standards, applied as I suggest, are the surest way to achieve that fundamental social unity which is postulated by democracy.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto (6 August 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 79-80.
1927

Education, Religion, Hope, Way

“It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should “reengineer” our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance.”

Michael Hammer (1948–2008) American academic

Source: "Reengineering work: don't automate, obliterate," 1990, p. 104

Time

“The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 99

“It is only the densest ethical ignorance that talks about a "Christian business" life; for business is now intrinsically evil.”

George D. Herron (1862–1925) American clergyman, writer and activist

Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), p. 26

Life, Evil

“It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively: something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The House in Paris

The House in Paris (1935)

Dogs, Cats, Lovers, Light

“As Uchimaru sees things, an engineer who doesn't think TQM applies to technical activities must not understand either engineering or TQM or both. TQM is the application of the scientific method to business (pick an important problem, get the facts, analyze the facts, find the underlying truth, plan a method of improvement based on the underlying truth, systematically test it to verify that it works, standardize the new method, and then the cycle around again)”

Shoji Shiba (1930) Japanese academic

Shōji Shiba, New American TQM. Productivity press, 1993. p. 463
Shiba talks about Kiyoshi Uchimaru, who was president of NEC's main microchip design subsidiary in the 1980s.

Truth, Understanding, Problem, Thinking

“Parties do not maintain themselves. They are maintained by effort. The government is not self-existent. It is maintained by the effort of those who believe in it. The people of America believe in American institutions, the American form of government and the American method of transacting business.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

As quoted in Manuscripts: speeches and messages of Calvin Coolidge, 1895–1924, the Massachusetts State Library, George Fingold Library, Boston.
1920s, Speech to the the Republican Commercial Travelers' Club (1920)

People, Effort

“Starting with the Minnesota twin study thirty-five years ago, and now with a mountain of data from twin, sibling, and adoption studies, we know that pretty much anything you can quantify about human personality, behavior, and intelligence is to some degree heritable, average-average at around the fifty percent level but sometimes much higher. We now in fact have a busy and exciting field of study called “behavioral genetics.” Given that all these traits are heritable, it follows from the ordinary laws of biology that different races will exhibit different statistical profiles on them. That’s not astonishing, mysterious, or horrible: It’s just first-floor-level science.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

John Derbyshire On Why Race Realism Makes More Sense Than “Magic Dirt” Theory http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-on-why-race-realism-makes-more-sense-than-magic-dirt-theory, VDARE, November 1, 2015.

Law, Behavior, Mountain, Intelligence

Quotes about business page 23

Quotes about business
page 23