As quoted by Tai-yi Lin (Lin Yutang's daughter) in her Foreword (26 March 1950) to The Importance of Living, p. x
“In former days this maxim was displayed in Business Offices, "Call upon a Businessman, at business hours, on business only. Go about your business and thus enable him to finish his own business. This is purely a business matter." There are two reasons why some people don't mind their own business; one is that they haven't any mind and the other that they haven't any business. However, now the Businessman is plagued at all hours by a spate of visitors with no business in view, who just drop in for free information or hospitality and more often than not for contributions to all sorts of charities, often of doubtful flavour or unauthorised.”
Peter de Noronha, The Pageant of Life (1964), Pages 134-135,
The Pageant of Life (1964), Businessmen
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Indian businessman 1897–1970Related quotes
Veblen (1917) An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace, and the Terms of Its Perpetuation, p. 168
“An Anarchist is one who minds his own business.”
The Better Part (1901)
Context: I AM an Anarchist.
All good men are Anarchists.
All cultured, kindly men; all gentlemen; all just men are Anarchists.
Jesus was an Anarchist.
A Monarchist is one who believes a monarch should govern. A Plutocrat believes in the rule of the rich. A Democrat holds that the majority should dictate. An Aristocrat thinks only the wise should decide; while an Anarchist does not believe in government at all. Richard Croker is a Monarchist; Mark Hanna a Plutocrat; Cleveland a Democrat; Cabot Lodge an Aristocrat; William Penn, Henry D. Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Walt Whitman were Anarchists. An Anarchist is one who minds his own business. An Anarchist does not believe in sending warships across wide oceans to kill brown men, and lay waste rice fields, and burn the homes of people who are fighting for liberty. An Anarchist does not drive women with babes at their breasts and other women with babes unborn, children and old men into the jungle to be devoured by beasts or fever or fear, or die of hunger, homeless, unhouseled and undone.
Destruction, violence, ravages, murder, are perpetrated by statute law..
“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!”
“4537. The Fool is busy in everyone's Business but his own.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“Business? Why, it's very simple: business is other people's money.”
Les affaires, c'est bien simple, c'est l'argent des autres.
La Question d'argent (1857), Act II, sc. vii; translation from Frederick Brown Theater and Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1980) p. 5.
Pericles commenting the participation of Athenian citizens in politics, as quoted in Models of Democracy (2006) by David Held, Stanford University Press, p. 14. Book II, chapter 40.