
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
Context: It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
As quoted in Corporate Survival: The Critical Importance of Sustainability Risk Management (2005) by Dan Robert Anderson, p. 138
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
Context: It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
“It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.”
Oluşmak (To Become) Aphorisms (Pan Publishing House, Istanbul, 2011)
“You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.”
As quoted in International Encyclopedia of Prose and Poetical Quotations (1951) by William S. Walsh
Attributed from posthumous publications
Variant: You can't learn in school what the world is going to do next year.
Unsourced
To Leon Goldensohn (13 March 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004