Businesspeople From The United States

"Attempts to secure an equal outcome always require unequal treatment of individuals."

"Capitalism is about the mutual creation of wealth rather than the pillaging of it."

"When all benefits are promised by the state, nobody need feel grateful for them."

"The business virtue par excellence is honesty—without it markets can’t long survive."

"We prepare for success by acquiring virtues."

"Business is the real test of the moral life."

"There’s such a thing as spiritual capital that has economic function and potential."

"The moral sentiments that constrain economic life also promote it."

"Myth: There’s conflict between selfish free markets and a benevolent world of human sympathy."

"Long-term success depends upon trust."

"The free economy is not the enemy but the friend of social capital."

"An exercise of moral imagination helps companies further goals of its members."

"Profit doesn’t appear as the goal but as a side effect of pursuing motivating principles."

"For a competent audience, uncommon men must have other uncommon men."

"The things we counterfeit are not worth the trouble of falling into disgrace with ourselves."

"How often our bosom swells and our temples throb to a thought which proves itself not to be worth anything but for the exaltation we feel while the swelling and throbbing are going on, which after all is something."

"Discontent follows ambition like a shadow."

"Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity."

"Normal is the wrong name often used for average."

"We condemn a sin before we have even tried it."

"Tradition supplants inspiration with the warmed-over article."

"We are no more alike under the skin than we are on top of it."

"It is getting what we started to get, not the thing got, which spells success."

"Who can set us straight in our labyrinth from the mazes of his own?"

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are but tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

"If someone offers to furnish a sure test, ask what the test was which made the sure test sure."

"Some live lies who won’t tell them; some tell lies who won’t live them."

"Where you find imagination tracing the outlines and reason filling in the details, there you have a man."

"If imagination would disentangle itself from absurdities, soon we should have it harnessed to reason, pulling the same plough."

"We fall short when we ascribe all the modes of happiness to walking in paths of rectitude. There are joys which only tramps and thieves know."

"A distant destination austerely reached rarely compensates for a loved starting-point forever lost."

"Thought the fool is to be pitied, still he is spared watching spurious wisdom turn to ashes in his head."

"Stand aloof from your own opinions; they seek to lure you with an illusive certainty."

"He who longs for the far-away proves thereby that he has corrupted the near-at-hand."

"Acting as your own sovereign power, grant yourself oblivion for past offences."

"Not a little of our condemnation of the acts of others is spillage from our own condemnation of our own acts."

"By an unfailing coincidence, the man who wrongs us is a villain, and the man who does us a kindness is a saint."

"Tradition is a prison with majority opinion the modern jailer."

"The deadliest contagion is majority opinion."

"When you think of the silly things people have said to you which have stopped you from saying the same silly things, you simply can’t do justice to your gratitude."

"We have to serve ourselves for many years before we gain our own confidence."

"When a man’s success becomes commonplace to him, it is his success no longer."

"Contentment has been worn as a crown by no end of sleepy heads."

"The man who feels that he must be hopeful and cheerful to get along ignores the careers of some pretty successful misanthropes."

"We should train our desires to show the way to our dreams."

"Having climbed to a height, it is easier to slip from it than to stay there after the zest of striving is removed."

"Expletives serve opinions well which are not sure enough of themselves to risk expression in restrained language."

"Compliments have lost their lure by the time a man does not have to fish for them."

"Symbols have a trick of stealing the show away from the thing they stand for."

"Imitation can acquire pretty much everything but the power which created the thing imitated."