Business Quotes

There's also the fickleness of the business and the fickleness of this country. It's like everyone loves people to go down and go up again, and then go down again. It's the way the business stays afloat, in a weird way.
– Philip Seymour Hoffman
I feel like I almost didn't grow up in the business, because my parents worked so hard at sheltering us from that. I was raised in Connecticut. And I honestly wasn't aware that my dad was a celebrity until I moved to Los Angeles a year ago.
– Bryce Dallas Howard
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
– Richard Hughes
Putting a fighter in the business world is like putting silk stockings on a pig.
– Jack Hurley
If I would be in this business for business, I wouldn't be in this business.
– Sol Hurok
It is not good business to be just a non-news station.
– Mark Hyman
I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!
– Henrik Ibsen
When I first started in the music business, I became estranged from my family and friends. Now I can enjoy a stress-free environment, be in control of my music and not have to worry about what's going on behind my back, because I'm surrounded by my people.
– Cheryl James
You gotta have fun. Regardless of how you look at it, we're playing a game. It's a business, it's our job, but I don't think you can do well unless you're having fun.
– Derek Jeter
Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves-to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today.
– Stewart B. Johnson
In business, as most of it is constituted today, a man becomes valuable only as he recognizes the relation of his work to that of all his associates. One worker more or less makes little difference to most big organizations, and any man may be replaced. It is the cumulative effort that counts.
– W. Alton Jones
Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.
– Helen Keller
It's now clear that from the very moment President Bush took office, Iraq was his highest priority as unfinished business from the first Bush Administration. His agenda was clear: find a rationale to get rid of Saddam.
– Edward Kennedy
We must get into the picture business. This is a new industry and a gold mine. it looks like another telephone industry.
– Joseph P. Kennedy
Whenever you're sitting across from some important person, always picture him sitting there in a suit of long red underwear. That's the way I always operated in business.
– Joseph P. Kennedy
It will help erase the idea that politics is a second-rate profession and a dirty business.
– Robert Francis Kennedy
Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.
– Larry King
I can't believe what I said about myself. What I said in my own private conversations with myself to an ESPN producer are my business, and I had no business saying them to someone else.
– Don King
We need young farmers to buy land, enter the business and stay in our rural communities to raise their families. One of the most difficult challenges for beginning farmers is gaining access to adequate capital. As farming changes, we need to update the programs to meet the loan needs of those that are contemplating a farming career.
– Steve King
The men whom I have seen succeed best in life always have been cheerful and hopeful men; who went about their business with a smile on their faces; and took the changes and chances of this mortal life like men; facing rough and smooth alike as it came.
– Charles Kingsley
Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn't going to work.
– Ben Kingsley
There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.
– Philip Knight
My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.
– John Knowles
If you're not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.
– Ray Kroc
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
– Ray Kroc
It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.
– Louis Kronenberger
I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.
– Stanley Kubrick
Years of training mean absolutely nothing. it's a disgusting, despicable business, and you should all know what you're up against.
– Robert Kass
Business is like sex. When it's good, it's very, very good; when it's not so good, it's still good.
– George Katona
I try to please people, to give them a good time, but I refuse to make my act conform to traditional show-biz standards of entertainment. There's a little voice that says, 'Oh, no, you can't do that, that's breaking all the rules.' That's the voice of show business. Then this other little voice says, 'Try it.' And most of the time, when the voice comes on and says, 'No,' that's the time it works.
– Andy Kaufman
Our business here is revelation. To reveal those objects Americans have kept on purpose in ways that permit them to be freshly perceived.
– Roger G. Kennedy
I'm very leery of show business, having been in Los Angeles for the last 10 years. Buzz is a dangerous thing that I've heard applied to a lot of people that I've since not heard of again.
– Greg Kinnear
When I started over 10 years ago, the business wasn't like it is today. Girls were not 12. They were a little bit older.
– Vendela Kirsebom
Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.
– Grenville Kleiser
Our business practices are no different than those of our competitors, but we are bigger, and thus more visible, so we get more flack.
– Phil Knight
We're not in the fashion business, as the Wall Street Journal wrote the other day. We're in the sports business, and there's a big difference.
– Phil Knight
I like doing business in a black city.
– Yaphet Kotto
I don't think art is a goal orientated business. I don't do things for the challenges, I only do them because I love them, I'm not really a goal orientated, achiever type of person.
– Greg Lake
From politics and business to music and food to culture, African-Americans have helped to shape our state's colorful past and its future.
– Mary Landrieu
I'm in the business where you get the business all the time.
– Cyndi Lauper
Anybody who has ever been in business, anybody who has ever paid bills, anybody who has ever lived in a serious adult life knows that indebtedness is a killer.
– Frank Lautenberg
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers -- but to track it home.
– David Herbert Lawrence
OPEC nations openly conspire to violate the norms of our antitrust laws. And yet they expect to do business with the United States and to continue to reap the benefits of this relationship.
– Senator Patrick Leahy
All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.
– Vladimir Lenin
I would like to probably have my own business. I haven't decided in what areas - maybe a spa. I like a day spa, something like that. Always giving back to women. Or big shoes because there's a huge market there. People have big feet now. Start at maybe size 10 and end at 15 with some really nice, fashionable shoes.
– Lisa Leslie
I'll still be in school in-season. It's a big challenge for me, but I've learned so much already from just the business side of the Sparks organization as well as the WNBA organization.
– Lisa Leslie
If a fellow wants to be a nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mail man to somebody on his behalf.
– Abraham Lincoln
As my mother and 1 were alone in the world, and as I was to be a business man, it was decided that I had better not waste time in going to college.
– Joseph C. Lincoln
There are men - now in power in this country - who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit.
– John V. Lindsay
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
– Walter Lippmann
It's been busier than ever I guess they were having a going-out-of-business sale.
– David Livingstone
For the past 32 years, I've done nothing outside the entertainment business. I've had some real highs and some real lows, but I love the work so much that I never once thought of quitting.
– Meat Loaf
Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse.
– Anita Loos
I thought she'd [her mother] offer me some sympathy. Instead, she said, 'Don't you ever call me crying again! You wanted to be in this business, so you better toughen up!' And I did.
– Jennifer Lopez
Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.
– Al Lopez
I really always felt that I was going to be an actress. I had a lot of confidence in the fact that I would do well from a very early age. I didn't know how tough the business is.
– Susan Lucci
Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.
– Henry R. Luce
Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.
– Henry R. Luce
Publishing is a business, but journalism never was and is not essentially a business. Nor is it a profession.
– Henry R. Luce
You gotta get up early in the morning to mess with me. I mean, I'm a businessman first-you gotta let the business come before the music, because it's all about being a good person and your ego can't get bigger than yourself and the things you're your trying to do, especially when you're promoting an album. So I feel it's real important to be businesslike in anything I do.
– Ludacris
Oh, what a day-to-day business life is.
– Jules Laforgue
Movie making is the slowest business on earth next to fossil manufacture.
– Aaron Latham
We're making a major move of the Internet, and runway.polo.com is a natural extension of both polo.com and our collection business.
– Ralph Lauren
In this business, you can never wash the dinner dishes and say they are done. You have to keep doing them constantly.
– Mary Wells Lawrence
A politician taking campaign money from gamblers in Nevada is like one taking campaign money from the auto people in Michigan. Gambling is our legal business.
– Paul Laxalt
Mainstream films have occupied Hollywood, but you can get bored very easily. It can be very repetitive, and I think now we want something fresh and something inspiring and different, daring. The mainstream film is very expensive to make and it scares people. It's made for the worldwide audience, you have to please so many people, and the business men start running the movies rather than artists.
– Ang Lee
I have been plodding away at this business for a very long time now. More often not so much facing danger, as resistance, disinformation, stubborn deception or just plain indifference that took a certain insistence and determination to overcome.
– Flora Lewis
In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death.
– Sam Llewelyn
Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
I only am in this business because I enjoy it. I think that is the only way to be in the business.
– Jake Lloyd
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
There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
– Norman Mailer
No employer today is independent of those about him. He cannot succeed alone, no matter how great his ability or capital. Business today is more than ever a question of cooperation.
– Orison Swett Marden
It's a business. If I could make more money down in the zinc mines I'd be mining zinc.
– Roger Maris
Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
– Karl Marx
People say we are survivors but I don't see us as survivors of anything. We are still here, there's nothing that's come and tried to dislodge us. We just go about our business.
– Dave Mason
Business is a combination of war and sport.
– Andre Maurois
Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man s. It is in the boys gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.
– Phyllis McGinley
Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community.
– Marshall McLuhan
You have no business being sick-every one of you should get well and get up and go to work, huh? Get up and go to work and earn some money and help send the gospel out! Amen!
– Aimee Semple McPherson
If you have learned how to disagree without being disagreeable, then you have discovered the secrete of getting along - whether it be business, family relations, or life itself.
– Bernard Meltzer
There's no doubt about it, show business lures the people who didn't get enough love, attention, or approval early in life and have grown up to become bottomless, gaping vessels of terrifying, abject need. Please laugh.
– Dennis Miller
What's so touching is the way we fight the war right until the moment our business is taken care of and then we turn on a dime and we immediately start taking care of people. It's like a shock and aw shucks campaign.
– Dennis Miller
Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.
– A. A. Milne
Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.
– Michel de Montaigne
All lasting business is built on friendship.
– Alfred A. Montapert
I've really gone into business since I got the 6 string, which was like starting all over.
– Wes Montgomery
Consequently many large railroad systems of heavy capitalization bid fair to run into difficulties on the first serious falling off in general business.
– John Moody
From that date forward, the history of the Vanderbilt railroads has been closely identified with the House of Morgan. J.P. Morgan and his business associates became the company's financial agents, and thereafter all plans of expansion or consolidation were handled directly by them.
– John Moody
The period of six years following the consolidation of 1853 was one of great prosperity for the New York Central system, and, notwithstanding the setbacks to business caused by the panic of 1857, large dividends were continuously paid on the capita stock.
– John Moody
The subsequent history of the Vanderbilt lines is chiefly a story of business expansion and growth. From 1885 to 1893, the great panic year, the New York Central each year added to its mileage, either by merger of smaller lines or by construction.
– John Moody
When business revived in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the history of American railroads began a new chapter.
– John Moody
While the New York Central was in an ideal position for handling all traffic destined for the New England States, the Pennsylvania could control practically none of this business, as its terminals were on the wrong side of the Hudson and necessitated... the much more expensive handling of freight.
– John Moody
It really isn't anybody's business how many people we have working for us. What's offensive is that I'm portrayed as this prima donna with these sycophants telling me how great I am all the time. Yes, they do work for me, but we're working together for a higher good.
– Demi Moore
The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich.
– Michael Moore
They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.
– John Viscount Morley
Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
– Van Morrison
I was a lifelong fan and a student of the wrestling business. When I got the call to come over as a consultant for that, to help with the production of a regular TV show, I was floored. It was a dream come true, like managing a football team would be for some people or whatever.
– Bob Mould
Maybe if I get off the road and stop playing with punk rock bands, there'll be a lot more records. It would probably involve me getting out of the conventional music business as we know it and heading more towards a self-sufficient, self-structured release-type thing. I wouldn't expect a regular label to keep up with the amount of stuff that I've got, or the amount of stuff I would have if I could just sit in a room and just write music.
– Bob Mould