The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.

The riskiness of modern corporate life is in fact the harmless conceit of the modern corporate executive, and it is vigorously proclaimed. Precisely because he lives an orderly and careful life the executive is moved to identify himself with the dashing entrepreneur of economic literature.

Production only fills a void that it has itself created.

It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. What is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.

Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freer handling.

Honour sinks where commerce long prevails.

American society has tried so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of production for profit and not primarily for use that now it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable and useless.

In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits.

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?