"Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions."

"The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things."

"A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example."

"To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order."

"The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed."

"We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model."

"The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it."

"Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution."

"And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much."

"It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior."

"[[Management] has authority only as long as it performs."

"The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society."

"An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance... Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes"--he owes performance and nothing else. .... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform."

"A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power."

"When Henry Ford said, "The customer can have a car in any color as long as it's black," he was not joking."

"The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive."

""Loafing" is easy, but "leisure" is difficult."

"As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it."

"Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor's 'scientific management' rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac Newton (or perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not much has been added to them since – even though he has been dead all of sixty years."

"One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it."

"A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure."

"The fault is in the system and not in the men."

"Decisions exist only in the present."

"It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all."

"The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives."

"Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it."

"Profit is not a cause but a result-"

"The prevailing economic theory of business enterprise and behavior, the maximization of profit—which is simply a complicated way of phrasing the old saw of buying cheap and selling dear—may adequately explain how Richard Sears operated. But it cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other business enterprise operates, nor how it should operate. The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless."

"The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different."

"A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future."

"A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive."

"We will have to learn to lead people rather then to contain them."

"Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution."

"The citizen of today in every developed country is typically an employee. He works for one of the institutions. He looks to them for his livelihood. He looks to them for his opportunities. He looks to them for access to status and function in society, as well as for personal fulfillment and achievement."

"Ideas are somewhat like babies--they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?""

"All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday--that is, not innovating--is far more risky than making tomorrow."

"Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations; most computer users have found that they now need more, and more expensive clerks, even though they call them "operators" or "programmers."

"Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission."

"If "socialism" is defined as "ownership of the means of production"--and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition--then the United States is the first truly Socialist country."

"The world economy is not yet a community--not even an economic community...Yet the existence of the "global shopping center" is a fact that cannot be undone. The vision of an economy for all will not be forgotten again."

"Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant."

"Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance."

"Through systematic terror, through indoctrination, through systematic manipulation of stimulus, reward, and punishment, we can today break man and convert him into brute animal... The first step toward survival is therefore to make government legitimate again by attempting to deprive it of these powers... by international action to ban such powers."

"Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred."

"No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil."

"In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise."

"The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves..."

"Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man."

"[T]hroughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive.... our word "school" - and its equivalent in all European languages - derives from a Greek word meaning "leisure.""

"In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"… On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration."