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A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts. —Richard Branson

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business. —Henry Ford, 1863 - 1947

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation. —Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874 - 1936

A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business. —Paul Gauguin, 1848 - 1904

A first rate businessman is (saving some ghastly character flaw) always a success, but a successful man is not necessarily first rate. —Alistair Cooke, 1908 - 2004

A government for protecting the coarser interests of the body, business and bread only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption to decay. —Amos Bronson Alcott, 1799 - 1888

A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that is generated in the crowd and on stage. It's my favorite part of the business - live concerts. —Elvis Presley, 1935 - 1977

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. —Eric Hoffer, 1902 - 1983

A man should never neglect his family for business. —Walt Disney, 1901 - 1966

A merchant who approaches business with the idea of serving the public well has nothing to fear from the competition. —James Cash Penney, 1875 - 1971

A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labour of the bees, will often be stung for his curiosity. —Alexander Pope, 1688 - 1744

A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. —Tom Stoppard

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it. —Lewis H. Lapham

A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the business man it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is something beyond it and that is quality. —Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867 - 1959

Above all, you want to create something you are proud of. That's always been my philosophy of business. I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive, then I believe you are better off doing nothing. —Richard Branson

Actors today try to avoid comedy because if you write a comedy that's not a success, the lack of success is immediately apparent because the audience is not laughing. A comedy is a big risk. This is a tremendously costly business and to put money into a picture that might not come off - oh, that's pretty risky. —Cary Grant, 1904 - 1986

Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They are as helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. —David Ogilvy, 1911 - 1999

After all, times are changing and women need the critical stimulus of competition outside the home. A girl must nowaways believe completely in herself as an individual. She must realize at the outset that a woman must do the same job better than a man to get as much credit for it. She must be aware of the various discriminations, both legal and traditional, against women in the business world. —Amelia Earhart, 1897 - 1937

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains. —Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

All art, in this business, is a matter of compromise. It's not one man's vision unless he takes very weak actors. —Sylvester Stallone

All I wanted was to be big, to be in show business and to travel ... and that's what I've been doing all my life. —Count Basie, 1904 - 1984

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called "guessing what was at the other side of the hill". —Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, 1769 - 1852

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

All this business about me never saying anything is a piece of crap. —Gary Cooper, 1901 - 1961

An actor who knows his business ought to be able to make the London telephone directory sound enthralling. —Donald Sinden

And I trusted someone to look after me on the business side of life. —Elton John

Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals' and plants' business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever. —Samuel Butler, 1835 - 1902

Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated. —Barry Forbes

Anybody in the creative business, as you might call it, has some sense of guilt about fooling around with fact, that you're commiting larceny, that all of life is material for your fabulations. —John le Carr√©

Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune. —Sam Walton, 1918 - 1992

Are soft-hearted people handicapped in business? You have heard a businessman say of someone else, He's all right, but he's too soft-hearted.... To be soft-hearted may be handicapping, in a sense. But on the whole, a soft heart is to be preferred to a hard heart. Hard-hearted, severe, dominating giants sometimes manage to get further and to amass more money. But they get less genuine joy out of life.... It is the hard-boiled employer, not the soft-hearted species, that incites most of our strikes and does most to endanger the harmonious progress of democracy. —B. C. Forbes, 1880 - 1954

As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth. —John Greenleaf Whittier, 1807 - 1892

As long as I can keep the Jesuits scrapping with the Dominicans, I can get on with the business of the province. —Maurice Duplessis, 1890 - 1959

As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance. —John Dewey, 1859 - 1952

As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712 - 1778

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. —Dinesh D'Souza

Baseball is too much of a sport to be a business and too much of a business to be a sport. —Philip K. Wrigley, 1894 - 1977

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be? - Anne Lamott

Being in this business for as long as I've been in it, it's sort of like living in a town or a city before the war and then after the war and then during the reconstruction and then during the time that it sprawls out to the malls. —Carly Simon

Benevolence is not in word and in tongue, but in deed and in truth. It is a business with men as they are, and with human life as drawn by the rough hand of experience. It is a duty which you must perform at the call of principle; though there be no voice of eloquence to give splendor to your exertions, and no music of poetry to lead your willing footsteps through the bowers of enchantment. It is not the impulse of high and ecstatic emotion. It is an exertion of principle. You must go to the poor man's cottage, though no verdure flourish around it, and no rivulet be nigh to delight you by the gentleness of its murmurs. If you look for the romantic simplicity of fiction you will be disappointed; but it is your duty to persevere in spite of every discouragement. Benevolence is not merely a feeling but a principle; not a dream of rapture for the fancy to indulge in, but a business for the hand to execute. —Thomas Chalmers, 1780 - 1847

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state. —Gore Vidal, 1925 - 2012

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward‚Äîreversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. —Michael Crichton, 1942 - 2008

Business has to be fun. For too many people, it's "just a job". —Jack Welch

Business is a game, the greatest game in the world if you know how to play it. —Thomas J. Watson, 1874 - 1956

Business is not just doing deals; business is having great products, doing great engineering, and providing tremendous service to customers. Finally, business is a cobweb of human relationships. —Ross Perot

Business is the salt of life. —Voltaire, 1694 - 1778

Business more than any other occupation is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight. —Henry Luce, 1898 - 1967

Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach. —Woodrow Wilson, 1856 - 1924

Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does. —Jane Austen, 1775 - 1817

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It's like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit. —Cory Doctorow

Businesses planned for service are apt to succeed; businesses planned for profit are apt to fail. —Nicholas Murray Butler, 1862 - 1947

But my observation has been, certainly in the news business, you've got to give 110 percent. —Sam Donaldson

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings. —Arthur Miller, 1915 - 2005

Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business. —Dave Barry

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it. —George Will

Comedy is a serious business. A serious business with only one purpose, to make people laugh. —W. C. Fields, 1880 - 1946

Commitments are one of the worst things to have in the music business. They're very annoying. —Neil Young

Congress, simply by requiring businesses to provide some employee benefit, gets businesses to cough up millions of dollars that have the illusion of not being taxes. —John Perkins

Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life; I never found any occupation more important. Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite of mine, I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it. —Giacomo Casanova, 1725 - 1798

Dawn is about luminosity and so is the iPhone.... The little drawings of the dawn are done while I'm still in bed.... If you're in my kind of business you'd be a fool to sleep through that.... Artists can't work office hours, can they? - David Hockney

Define your business goals clearly so that others can see them as you do. —George Burns, 1896 - 1996

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts. —Margaret Sanger, 1879 - 1966

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. —Abraham Lincoln, 1809 - 1865

Do you know why this world is as abad as it is? ... It is because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doers to light.... My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt. —Anna Sewell, 1820 - 1878

Don't just let your business or your job make something for you; let it make something of you. —Jim Rohn, 1930 - 2009

Drive thy business, or it will drive thee. —Benjamin Franklin, 1706 - 1790

Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear. —Ayn Rand, 1905 - 1982

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress. —Gore Vidal, 1925 - 2012

Every successful enterprise requires three men: a dreamer, a business-man, and a son-of-a-bitch. —Peter McArthur, 1866 - 1924

Everybody is sleeping with everybody in this business but the artist is the only one getting screwed. —Billy Joel

Everybody's business is nobody's business. —Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800 - 1859

Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessities of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily. —A. E. Housman, 1859 - 1936

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business. —Malcolm Forbes, 1919 - 1990

Find me any performer anywhere who isn't egocentric. You'd better believe you're good, or you've got no business being out there. —Johnny Carson, 1925 - 2005

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application - why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again. —Howard Nemerov, 1929 - 1991

For the last 15 years, Microsoft's master business plan seems to have been, "Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it." - David Pogue

Frank W. Woolworth once told me that the turning-point in his career did not come until he was thrown flat on his back by illness. He was sure that his business would go to pieces during his long, enforced absence. Instead, he discovered that he had in his employ men who could overcome difficulties when given power to exercise initiative. After that Woolworth left many problems and difficulties to be solved by subordinates and turned his attention to big things. —B. C. Forbes, 1880 - 1954

From the business point of view - not to overstate it - intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance. —Esther Dyson

Further, Take heed that you faithfully perform the business you have to do in the world, from a regard to the commands of God; and not from an ambitious desire of being esteemed better than others. —David Brainerd, 1718 - 1747

Gentlemen, I have lived a long time and am convinced that God governs in the affairs of men. If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? I move that prayer imploring the assistance of Heaven be held every morning before we proceed to business. —Benjamin Franklin, at the Constitutional Convention

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a sub-prime fish loan and you're in business, buddy. —Stephen Colbert

God forgive me, I do still see that my nature is not to be quite conquered, but will esteem pleasure above all things; though, yet in the middle of it, it hath reluctancy after my business, which is neglected by my fallowing my pleasure. However, music and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is. —Samuel Pepys, 1633 - 1703

Golf isn't just my business, it's my hobby. —Lee Trevino

Good design is good business. Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all ... good design must primarily serve people. —Thomas J. Watson, 1874 - 1956

Government is not show business. —Warren Beatty

Half the time men think they are talking business, they are wasting time. —E. W. Howe, 1853 - 1937

Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. —Thomas Carlyle, 1795 - 1881

He that makes his pleasure be his business, will never make his business be a pleasure. —Daniel Defoe, 1660 - 1731

He's happy who, far away from business, like the races of men of old, tills his ancestral fields with his own oxen, unbound by any interest to pay. —Horace, 65 - 8 BC

Here's a pointer culled from the careers of men who have attained notable success: Don't sit in your office during the hours prospects can be seen. Do your office work before or after the hours during which possible customers can be reached. This may mean adding an hour or two quite often to your day's work; but in times like this particularly, the securing of a satisfactory amount of business through the expenditure of an extra hour or two a day is not an unreasonable price to pay. —B. C. Forbes, 1880 - 1954

How good one feels when one is full - how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. —Jerome K. Jerome, 1859 - 1927

I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and I am a better businessman because I am an investor. —Warren Buffett

I am interested in a lot of things - not just show business and my passion for animals. I try to keep current in what's going on in the world. I do mental exercises. I don't have any trouble memorizing lines because of the crossword puzzles I do every day to keep my mind a little limber. I don't sit and vegetate. —Betty White

I am more of a sponge than an inventor. I absorb ideas from every source. My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant but misdirected ideas of others. —Thomas Edison, 1847 - 1931

I am quite conservative about my appearance. At college, when all my friends were getting piercings or daft haircuts, I lacked the required self-confidence, so decided such vanities were a distraction from the main business of opposing Thatcher. —John O'Farrell

I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can't truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles. —Zig Ziglar, 1926 - 2012

I can't bear to face a camera. But I never brought anything to this business and I have no respect for acting. Maybe if I had learned something it would be different. But I never did anything to be proud of. —Ava Gardner, 1922 - 1990

I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn't dare to make an enemy should get out of the business. —Bette Davis, 1908 - 1989

I don't advise anyone to take up painting as a business proposition, unless they really have talent. But I will say that I have did remarkable for one of my years. —Grandma Moses, 1860 - 1961

I don't care who anybody sleeps with. If a couple has been together all that time - and there are gay relationships that are more solid than some heterosexual ones - I think it's fine if they want to get married. I don't know how people can get so antisomething. Mind your own business, take care of your affairs, and don't worry about other people so much. —Betty White

I don't like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don't believe in God, or at least not in the one we've invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they've invented in America who supply their servants with toupees, television stations and, most importantly, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world. —Douglas Adams, 1952 - 2001

I don't want to do business with those who don't make a profit, because they can't give the best service. —Richard Bach