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Capitalism Quotes and Quotations
 You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.  Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can do neither, administer. There can be no return to prosperity while the government (of Ontario) believes that taking money from the people who have earned it and giving it away to the people who haven't, in exchange for their votes and regardless of merit, is the essence of fairness. Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the business man. No-wher so bisy a man as he ter nas, And yet he semed bisier that he was. As one retiring chief executive said to his successor "Yesterday was the last day you heard the truth from your subordinates." Commerce is greedy. Ideology is blood-thirsty. Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behaviour that is often considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business. Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble-making individual. The big print giveth and the fine print taketh away. Expenditure rises to meet income. I am a Millionaire. That is my religion. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services. Man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. It might be termed the Law of Triviality. Briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in adverse proportion to the sum involved. 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 taxi cab or fry a pan of fish. Live together like brothers and do business like strangers. Managers don't have to cook the books to manipulate earnings; they often have all the power they need in the leeway built into accounting rules. Mere parsimony is not economy . . . expense, and great expense, may be an essential part of true economy. One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears - by listening to them. Remember that when an employee enters your office, he is in a strange land. The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. The big unions served a noble purpose once, and bless them for it. Now they're part of the problem and must give way if America is to move and to participate in management and achieve reasonable productivity. Luck is infatuated with the efficient. One of the best-kept secrets in America is that people are aching to make a commitment, if they only had the freedom and environment in which to do so. The big-business mergers and the big-labour mergers have the appearance of dinosaurs mating. The corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The manager with the in-basket problem does not yet understand that he must discipline himself to take care of activities that fail to excite him. To business that we love we rise betime, And go to it with delight. The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it. There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job. There is only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits without deception or fraud. Things have to be made to happen in a way you want them to happen. Without management, without the intervention of organized willpower the desired result simply cannot be obtained. Today's sales should be better than yesterday's - and worse than tomorrow's. Twenty generations ago - around the year 1390 - you had 1,048,576 ancestors. In the 21st generation of your family that number will double again. We have yet to find a significant case where the company did not move in the direction of the chief executive's home. You are never giving, nor can you ever give, enough service. In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch Is offering too little and asking too much. The French are with equal advantage content, So we clap on Dutch bottoms just 20%. Christmas is over, and Business is Business. People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons. All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage. Expansion means complexity and complexity decay. One man's wage rise is another man's price increase. Few have heard of Fra Luca Parioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping, but he has probably had more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo. When you've got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow. Chaplin is no businessman - all he knows is that he can't take anything less. What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system. Barbaric accuracy - whimpering humility. Patience is a most necessary quality for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request. A holding company is the people you give your money to while you're being searched. In economics, the majority is always wrong. Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision. Pounds are the sons, not of pounds, but of pence. Business? It's quite simple. It's other people's money. A man isn't a man until he has to meet a payroll. As a rule, from what I've observed, the American Captain of Industry doesn't do anything out of business hours. When he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night, he just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a Captain of Industry again. I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them. Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work. Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal. Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country. Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still? The happiest time in any man's life is when he is in red-hot pursuit of a dollar with a reasonable prospect of overtaking it. In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. Business is a combination of war and sport. Net - the biggest word in the language of business. Big business is basic to the very life of this country; and yet many -perhaps most - Americans have a deep-seated fear and an emotional repugnance to it. Here is monumental contradiction. The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it. Good management consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people. All business proceeds on beliefs, on judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties. Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. Capital is past savings accumulated for future production. The business of America is business. Power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will. In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education - not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs where new ways are wrought ... nothing has been so rare in recent years as an Ivy League graduate who has made a significant innovation in American enterprise. If a cluttered desk is an indication of a cluttered mind, what is indicated by an empty desk? A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator. Had there been a computer a hundred years ago, it would probably have predicted that by now there would be so many horse-drawn vehicles it would be impossible to clear up all the manure. The Middle East is a region where oil is thicker than blood. All professions are a conspiracy against the country. Labour is not a commodity, or a standard, or a means to an ulterior end, but an end in itself. Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all. Along this tree From root to crown Ideas flow up And vetoes down. A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise. Business is more exciting than any game. A company is judged by the president it keeps. Inflation is defined as the quality that makes balloons larger and candy bars smaller. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business. It is not the employer who pays wages - he only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages. Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind . . . more deeply. But it does not look as if it did. The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun. In all modern depressions, recessions, or growth-correction, as variously they are called, we never miss the goods that are not produced. We miss only the opportunities for the labour - for the jobs - that are not provided. The solid wealth of insurance companies and the success of those who organize gambling are some indication of the profits to be derived from the efficient use of chance. To convert an hourly wage to an approximate yearly salary, double the wage and change the decimal to a comma. After an eight-hour day, workers require three overtime hours to produce two regular hours of results. Gross National Product is our Holy Grail. When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary. Few great men could pass Personnel. You build on cost and you borrow on value. By pursuing his own interest (the individual) frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. Management is now where the medical profession was when it decided that working in a drug store was not sufficient training to become a doctor. The Bell System is like a damn big dragon. You kick it in the tail, and two years later, it feels it in its head. Benefits should be granted little by little, so that they may be better enjoyed. The price spoils the pleasure. Whose bread I eat, his song I sing. 
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