What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits.

Honour sinks where commerce long prevails.

It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. What is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.

Production only fills a void that it has itself created.

The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.

In democracies, nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce: it attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it.

You never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick.

A man who is always ready to believe what is told him will never do well, especially a businessman.

It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.

Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.

The business of America is business.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

The commerce of the world is conducted by the strong, and usually it operates against the weak.

No matter who reigns, the merchant reigns.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Time is the measure of business.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!

The customer is always right! John Wanamaker must be turning in his grave. If you're a customer today, you're an intruder.