Quotes 10

As incumbents seek to increase the concentration of industry power, newcomers plot ways to dilute it. While dinosaurs merge, upstarts race toward the future. Bulk is no bulwark against the onslaught of revolutionary new competitors. And it's hard to mate and run at the same time. - Gary Hamel

Too many mergers resemble the marriage of two cripples who become twice as old, twice as bureaucratic and twice as undynamic. - Peter Drucker

Select stocks the way porcupines make love - very carefully. - Bob Dinda

Inherited wealth is a big handicap to happiness. It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality. - William Vanderbilt

Dealmaking beats working. That's why there are deals that make no sense. - Peter Drucker

Being in power is like being a lady. If you tell people you are, you aren't. - Margaret Thatcher

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them for the most part humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter. - W. Somerset Maugham

Common sense is not so common. - Voltaire

Driving a car involves a foot on the gas, hands on the wheel, and eyes on the road. Navigating on the bond markets requires a foot on interest rates, a handle on the prospects of being repaid, and an eye on inflation. - Steven Mintz

People should be more concerned with the return of their principal than the return on their principal. - Jim Rogers

I want the whole of Europe to have one currency; it will make trading much easier. - Napolean Bonaparte

The management of stock exchange investments is a kind of low pursuit from which it is a good thing for most members of society to be free. - John Maynard Keynes

I would rather see finance less proud and industry more content. - Winston Churchill

Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. - Aaron Levenstein

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money. - Samuel Johnson

The one thing that hurts more than having to pay income tax is not having to pay income tax. - Thomas Duwar

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. - Damon Runyon

If, after half an hour, you haven't figured out who the patsy is, then you're the patsy. - Warren Buffett on shares and poker

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in. - John D. Rockefeller

I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. - Warren Buffett

There are two classes of forecasters: those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know. - John K. Galbraith

Either they're trying to con you or they're trying to con themselves. - Warren Buffett on financial analysts

Playing the stock market is analogous to entering a newspaper beauty-judging contest in which one must select the six prettiest faces out of a hundred photographs, with the prize going to the person whose selections most nearly conform to those of the group as a whole. - John Maynard Keynes

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. - Ambrose Pierce

In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces - never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen. - Warren Buffett

640k ought to be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates

I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they're going to look like in ten to fifteen years time. Take Wrigley's chewing gum. I don't think the internet is going to change how people chew gum. - Warren Buffett