This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In no country does one find so many men of eminent capacity for business, shrewd, forcible, and daring, who are so uninteresting, so intellectually barren, outside the sphere of their business understanding." - James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce
"We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty and charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open. So many people seem to go about their life’s business with their eyes shut. Indeed, they object to other people keeping their eyes open. Unable to lay themselves, they dislike the play of others." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"The business of government is to promote the happiness of the society, by punishing and rewarding." - Jeremy Bentham
"I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs." - John Davison Rockefeller, Jr.
"[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"These men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"It is not the business of virtue to extirpate the affections of the mind, but to regulate them." - Joseph Addison
"Though we seem grieved at the shortness of life in general, we are wishing every period of it at an end. The minor longs to be at age, then to be a man of business, then to make up an estate, then to arrive at honors, then to retire." - Joseph Addison
"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
"We do not know a nation until we know its pleasures of life, just as we do not know a man until we know how he spends his leisure. It is when a man ceases to do the things he has to do, and does the things he likes to do, that the character is revealed. It is when the repressions of society and business are gone and when the goads of money and fame and ambition are lifted, and man's spirit wanders where it listeth, that we see the inner man, his real self." - Lin Yutang
"Patience is a most necessary quality for business: many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Dispatch is the soul of business; and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Few people do business well who do nothing else." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"In the field of modern business, so rich in opportunity for the exercise of man's finest and most varied mental faculties and moral qualities, mere money-making cannot be regarded as the legitimate end... since with the conduct of business human happiness or misery is inextricably interwoven." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man, either by a considerable gift or a sum of money or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity's golden ladder." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Business is religion, and religion is business. The man who does not make a business of religion has a religious life of no force, and the man who does not make a religion of his business has a business life of no character." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Our business in life is not to get ahead of other people, but to get ahead of ourselves. To break our own record, to outstrip our yesterdays by todays, to bear our trials more beautifully than we ever dreamed we could, to whip the tempter inside and out as we never whipped him before, to give as we have never given, to do our work with more force and a finer finish than ever, - this is the true idea, - to get ahead of ourselves... to play a better game of life." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"The tests of life are to make, not break us. Trouble may demolish man's business but build up his character. There blow at the outer man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man. If God, then, puts or permits anything hard in our lives, be sure that the real peril, the real trouble, is that we shall lose if we flinch or rebel." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"The tests of life are to make, not break us. Trouble may demolish a man’s business but build his character. The blow at the outward man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man. If God, then, puts or permits anything hard in our lives, be sure that the real peril, the real trouble, is what we shall lose if we flinch or rebel." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Nothing is so great an adversary to those who make it their business to please as expectation." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"There's no such thing as business ethics; there's just ethics. And ethics makes no concessions for the real or imagined necessities of making a profit." - Michael S. Josephson
"Though the ethical challenges we face in the workplace may be different from those in our personal lives, the principles of ethical conduct that apply to those challenges do not change. There is no such thing as business ethics - there is only ethics." - Michael S. Josephson
"The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubts." - Morris Raphael Cohen
"War is the business of barbarians." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
"Plainly this is not an age of the meditative man. It is a squinting, sprinting, shoving age. Substitutes for repose are million dollar business. Silence, already a nation's most critical shortage, is almost a nasty word. Modern man may or may not be obsolete, but he is certainly wired for sound." - Norman Cousins
"“Every morning of the world I give thanks for all the wonderful things in my life,” declared a young man enthusiastically. “And do you know something? It’s strange indeed, but the more I give thanks, the more I have reason to be thankful. For, you see, blessings just pile up on me one after another like nobody’s business”... The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for... The attitude of gratitude revitalizes the entire mental process by activating all other attitudes, thus stimulating creativity... Remember that praise and thanksgiving are the most powerful prayers of all." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture, not doing a sum." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"As a small business-person, you have no greater leverage than truth." - Paul Hawken
"I also think that there's going to have to be more structure in our society, more discipline. Therefore, I think business leaders would be well-advised to spend much more time trying to have an influence on the political system." - Peter Scotese
"The world has a way of giving what is demanded of it. If you are frightened and look for failure and poverty, you will get them, no matter how hard you may try to succeed. Lack of faith in yourself, in what life will do for you, cuts you off from the good things of the world. Expect victory and you make victory. Nowhere is this truer than in business life, where bravery and faith bring both material and spiritual rewards." - Preston Bradley
"The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What is the first business of him who philosophizes? To throw away self-conceit. For it is impossible for a man to begin to learn that which he thinks that he knows." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"No wonder poets sometimes have to seem so much more businesslike than business men. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of." - Robert Frost
"Leisure and solitude are the best effect of riches, because mother of thought. Both are avoided by most rich men, who seek company and business, which are signs of being weary of themselves." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
"Men err when they think they can be in human exploiters in their business life and loving fathers and husbands at home." - Smiley Blanton
"I have indeed no business n life than to go about persuading you all, young and old, to care less for your bodies and your possessions and to make the protection of your souls your chief concern." - Socrates NULL
"Creating the unity to run an effective business or a family or a marriage requires great personal strength and courage. No amount of technical administrative skill in laboring for the masses can make up for lack of nobility of personal character in developing relationships. It is a t a very essential, one-on-one level, that we live the primary laws of love and life." - Stephen Covey, fully Stephen Richards Covey
"For the ordinary business of life an ounce of habit is worth a pound of intellect." - Thomas Brackett Reed, aka Czar Reed
"He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of daily virtuous living." - Thomas Carlyle
"Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." - Thomas Carlyle
"Make it thy chief Design and thy great Business, not to be Rich and Great: but so to live in this World as that thou mayest reasonably believe thou has God for thy Friend." - Thomas Fuller
"The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"Any life truly lived is a risky business, and if one puts up too many fences against the risks one ends by shutting out life itself." - W. H. Davies, fully William Henry Davies
"Modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Business must be profitable if it is to continue to succeed, but the glory of business is to make it so successful that it may do things that are great chiefly because they ought to be done." - Charles Schwab, fully Charles R. "Chuck" Schwab