Quotes & Sayings About Enterprise

Capitalists don't want free trade any more than they want whooping cough. Their nature is to conglomerate, homogenate, vertically integrate and dominate until there is no competition. The rules? Screw the rules! They'll rig the game, spit on the ball, bribe the refs, tilt the playing field, pork the cheerleaders and kick free enterprise in the nuts. — Tim Dorsey

The sole function of Government is to bring about a condition of affairs favorable to the beneficial development of private enterprise. — Herbert Hoover

Physics is perceived as a lonesome, nerdy kind of enterprise that has very little to do with human feelings and the things that excite people day-to-day about each other. Yet physicists in their own working environment are very social creatures. — Leonard Susskind

When individual enterprise is free and unhampered, profit-and-loss calculations set precise limits to a businessman's temptations to expand his services ... a government valuable they may be, have no market price and, therefore, cannot be subjected to profit-and-loss accounting. — Hans F. Sennholz

We will naturally pursue our goals on the strength of our own resources, skills and enterprise. But, we know that we will be more successful when we do this in partnership with the world. — Narendra Modi

To become financially independent you must turn part of your income into capital; turn capital into enterprise; turn enterprise into profit; turn profit into investment; and turn investment into financial independence. — Jim Rohn

Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the truth ahead of nationality, ethnicity, class and color. — John C. Polanyi

Furthermore, the spirit of enterprise which had its first intellectual development in England has especially flourished here as well as throughout all of Canada, while the same spirit has become less virile in the land of its origin. — Charles E. Wilson

Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism. — Ralph Nader

Working for a federal agency was like trying to dislodge a prune skin from the roof of the mouth. More enterprise went into the job than could be justified by the results. — Caskie Stinnett

The system that enables the most people to earn the most success is free enterprise, by matching up people's skills, interests, and abilities. In contrast, redistribution simply spreads money around. Even worse, it attenuates the ability to earn success by perverting economic incentives. — Arthur C. Brooks

The late '60s and the '70s, a lot of this really beautiful equipment was being made and installed into studios around the world and the Neve boards were considered like the Cadillacs of recording consoles. They're these really big, behemoth-looking recording desks; they kind of look like they're from the Enterprise in Star Trek or something like that. They're like a grayish color, sort of like an old Army tank with lots of knobs, and to any studio geek or gear enthusiast it's like the coolest toy in the world. — Dave Grohl

Nowhere can I think so happily as in a train. I am not inspired; nothing so uncomfortable as that. I am never seized with a sudden idea for a masterpiece, nor form a sudden plan for some new enterprise. My thoughts are just pleasantly reflective. I think of all the good deeds I have done, and (when these give out) of all the good deeds I am going to do. I look out of the window and say lazily to myself, "How jolly to live there"; and a little farther on, "How jolly not to live there." I see a cow, and I wonder what it is like to be a cow, and I wonder whether the cow wonders what it is to be like me; and perhaps, by this time, we have passed on to a sheep, and I wonder if it is more fun being a sheep. My mind wanders on in a way which would annoy Pelman a good deal, but it wanders on quite happily, and the "clankety-clank" of the train adds a very soothing accompaniment. So soothing, indeed, that at any moment I can close my eyes and pass into a pleasant state of sleep. — A.A. Milne

The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million Americans. — Henry Hazlitt

It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. — Henry David Thoreau

The successful conduct of an industrial enterprise requires two quite distinct qualifications: fidelity and zeal. — John Stuart Mill

Some [intentional communities], like the Shakers and the Harmony Society, have endured for a century or even longer. The Hutterians, to cite an extreme example, are today still strongly committed to communal living after practicing it, punctuated only by occasional lapses into private enterprise, for 450 years. The Hutterian rate of membership turnover has been only about 0.0006 per year. — Benjamin Zablocki

Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy. — Terence McKenna

Children are sent to school to be civilized, to learn to be part of the social enterprise. — Robert Fulghum

If your company disappeared, would it leave a gaping hole that could not easily be filled by any other enterprise on the planet? — James C. Collins

If a leader demonstrates that his purpose is noble, that the work will enable people to connect with something large - more permanent than their material existence - people will give the best of themselves to the enterprise — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it. — George Lois

A cooperative enterprise is the key alternative to a traditional capitalist enterprise. All the workers, whatever they do inside an enterprise, have to be able to participate in collectively arriving at the decisions about what, how, where to produce, and what to do with the profits in a democratic way. One person, one vote should decide how these things are done. — Richard D. Wolff

Capitalism is supposedly free enterprise. Supposedly about the free individual. But capitalism itself is so massive that the guy on the street gets caught in paying rent, taxes, and he doesn't own himself at all. — Frank Capra

A democratic Europe of nation states could be a force for liberty, enterprise and open trade. But, if creating a United States of Europe overrides these goals, the new Europe will be one of subsidy and protection — Margaret Thatcher

Why is our free-enterprise system so strong?- Not because it stands still, frozen in the past, but because it has always adapted to changing realities — Lee Iacocca

It has become impossible to give up the enterprise of disarmament without abandoning the whole great adventure of building up a collective peace system. — Arthur Henderson

Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. — Ronald Reagan

Luck is earned. Luck is working so hard at your craft, service or enterprise that sooner or later you get a break. — Paul Hawken

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture. — Hannes Alfven

The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how. — Roger Scruton

Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts. — Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

I stick my finger in existence - it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint? — Soren Kierkegaard

Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit. — Lawrence Wright

The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead. — Aaron Levie

When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens. A crack appears in the membrane. Like the first craze when a chick pecks at the inside of its shell. Angel midwives congregate around us; they assist as we give birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded in our soul, our daimon, our genius. — Steven Pressfield

It is men of desperate fortunes on the one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who go abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road. — Daniel Defoe

The devaluation of words and promises regarding free enterprise is, in principle, worse than the devaluation of the rouble — Dmitry Medvedev

However, Americans have created a system in which wealth is created with hard work, innovation, talent and enterprise. People who display these qualities move up in life. — Chetan Bhagat

I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world's ever known. — Barack Obama

This praise, though far from fulsome, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some power of spirit, that made me want to please him. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was no more than the intensity of his wish. Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting. What this one wanted became his province and his meal, he governed it and fed on it from the first moment of desire. Besides, with the perversity of our nature, being tested had made me more desire to succeed, though knowing the enterprise to be sinful. — Barry Unsworth

Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals. — Llewellyn Rockwell

The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast. — Peter Drucker

Poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value. — Major Jackson

But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would *be* their lives. — Michael Chabon

Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, which again, from the point of view of the Earther, happily has them built in from the start), it is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals. — Iain M. Banks

And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow, which can be brooded over painlessly. — Marcel Proust

Free enterprise is the sure and so far the only known way of constantly improving the well-being of mankind. — Raymond C. Hoiles

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise. — Dave Eggers

Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Free enterprise is not a bad idea and has produced art. — Ishmael Reed

Metaphorically, IT is the nervous system of the enterprise body. — Pearl Zhu

Electronic medical records are, in a lot of ways, I think the aspect of technology that is going to revolutionize the way we deliver care. And it's not just that we will be able to collect information, it's that everyone involved in the healthcare enterprise will be able to use that information more effectively. — Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them. — J.M. Coetzee

In business, I believe that if you focus only on the journey, you'll miss the whole point of the enterprise. There has to be a goal, an end game of some kind; otherwise, you're just spinning your wheels. Yes, the journey is important, but the destination is important, too. — Ivanka Trump

When you take a look at the transition from server software to Azure, what's going on in terms of cloud infrastructure, the company is absolutely the No. 1 company serving enterprise backbone needs, which is fantastic. It's making the migration to cloud. We started a good thing with Azure, and the company has made well more than two years of progress in terms of being able to compete with the right cost profile, margin structure, and innovation versus Amazon. — Steve Ballmer

Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public ... The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise. — Arthur Miller

A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks. — Thomas Jefferson

In actual life, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first step forward in faith. — August Wilhelm Von Schlegel

If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that its workability and advantages have ceased to be self-evident. — Eric Hoffer

The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science. — Stephen Jay Gould

By multiplying the means of gratification, by promoting the introduction and circulation of the precious metals, those darling objects of human avarice and enterprise, it serves to vivify and invigorate the channels of industry, and to make them flow with greater activity and copiousness. The assiduous merchant, the laborious husbandman, the active mechanic, and the industrious manufacturer,-all orders of men, look forward with eager expectation and growing alacrity to this pleasing reward of their toils. — Alexander Hamilton

In the foundation and development of a successful enterprise there must be a single-minded pursuit of financial profit. — C. Northcote Parkinson

Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. — H.G.Wells

A few years ago we colonised this place with some of our finest felons, thieves, muggers, alcoholics and prostitutes, a strain of depravity which I believe has contributed greatly to this country's amazing vigour and enterprise. — Ian Wooldridge

If an enterprise does not aspire to be the best of its kind, it will attract second-rate employees, and it will be soon forgotten. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I can't help thinking that caring possibly is the riskiest enterprise known to man. But how stop caring? — Charlotte Vale Allen

I do not want to presuppose anything as known. I see in my explanation in section 1 the definition of the concepts point, straight line and plane, if one adds to these all the axioms of groups i-v as characteristics. If one is looking for other definitions of point, perhaps by means of paraphrase in terms of extensionless, etc., then, of course, I would most decidedly have to oppose such an enterprise. One is then looking for something that can never be found, for there is nothing there, and everything gets lost, becomes confused and vague, and degenerates into a game of hide and seek. — David Hilbert

People with targets and jobs dependent upon meeting them will probably meet the targets - even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it. — W. Edwards Deming

The borrowers of America and all the world turn to New York ... It is to the quotations on the New York Stock Exchange that men of affairs from Penobscot to Honolulu turn each morning to find how beats the pulse of prosperity and enterprise. — Charles A. Beard

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. — Henry David Thoreau

intended as a dig at my father, the enterprise being another of science's excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes — Karen Joy Fowler

He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt. — W. Somerset Maugham

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise. — Mitt Romney

This, in essence, is the problem with the scientific view of reality. Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something - reality - that may not be understood at all. — Michael Crichton

My high-tech aversion caused me to make fun of the typical biotech enterprise: $100 million in cash from selling shares, one hundred Ph.D.'s, 99 microscopes, and zero revenues. — Peter Lynch

Science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole. — Simone Weil

Private enterprise is not as spectacular nor as easy to see as the socialist way of temporarily diffusing poverty by eating up the seed corn - the tools - which will increase poverty in the long run. — Raymond C. Hoiles

Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. — Thomas Jefferson

Benjamin Graham wrote, "Those with enterprise haven't the money, and those with money haven't the enterprise, to buy stocks when they are cheap." — Seth Klarman

God, Private Enterprise and government have made me what I am, and now they have to take some of the blame. — Joy Baluch

Two paths lie ahead of today's CIOs. One leads to becoming a trusted senior executive leader of the enterprise; the other leads to a technical management, "just keep the lights on and do it cheap" role. — Marianne Broadbent

Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page. — Steven Pressfield

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. — Peter Drucker

Today's partners can be your competitors tomorrow. And today's competitors can be your partners tomorrow. — Suzy Kassem

What the Democrats have to understand is that while we do need to reform our regulation and we do need more restrictions, it is true that it is capitalism and free enterprise and companies that create jobs and wealth for every American. — Michael Bloomberg

People who live at subsistence level want first things to be put first. They are not particularly interested in freedom of religion, freedom of the press, free enterprise as we understand it, or the secret ballot. Their needs are more basic: land, tools, fertilizers, something better than rags for their children, houses to replace their shacks, freedom from police oppression, medical attention, primary schools. — Mao Zedong

I always look at a group of people who want to attempt an enterprise greater than their means. They begin on this enterprise and they fail. — Mario Monicelli

Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiphany. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. (p. 130) — Nancy Fichtman Dana

Be content with what you have Be satisfied with your dwelling place to accommodate your enterprise, Restrain your tongue, And shed tears of regret regarding past sins you committed knowingly, and those you do not recognize. — Abdullah, Son Of Masud

For the protection of the community, of individual life and health, there are some necessities that should be provided for all at the expense of all, such as roads, pure water, and sanitary systems for concentrated population, and reasonably comprehensive mail service. The determination between services that should be operated by the government and those which should be left to private enterprise under proper control should be governed by the degree of necessity to the community as a whole. — Theodore Newton Vail

In every enterprise ... the mind is always reasoning, and, even when we seem to act without a motive, an instinctive logic still directs the mind. Only we are not aware of it, because we begin by reasoning before we know or say that we are reasoning, just as we begin by speaking before we observe that we are speaking, and just as we begin by seeing and hearing before we know what we see or what we hear. — Claude Bernard

John Barleycorn was a hero bold, Of noble enterprise, For if you do but taste his blood, 'Twill make your courage rise, Twill make a man forget his wo; 'Twill heighten all his joy. — Robert Burns

It was an age of lavishness. Of enormous meals, enormous families, enormous spreading skirts and an enormous, spreading Empire. An age of gross living, grinding poverty, inconceivable prudery, insufferable complacency and incomparable enterprise. — M.M. Kaye

Conscious evolution of the free enterprise system happens when we realize that neither the heavy handedness of government nor the greed of unregulated enterprise holds the answer to prosperity. It is the radical introspection of both sides leading to a conscious evolution that will save this system we call capitalism. — Said Elias Dawlabani

System uptime, data protection, and identity theft are weighty issues. It takes real ingenuity to out-think the fraudsters who are trying to steal identities and hack into enterprise systems. The 12 smart companies that debuted security solutions today at DEMO have designed serious, and seriously clever, innovations. — Chris Shipley

All of us need just one good accomplishment in order to get by. Obviously he can't spend the rest of his life climbing trees, but it's the agility and enterprise involved in the act that will make him a survivor. Enough — Ruskin Bond

I want to go where I can be of the most service to the general enterprise. — Ezra Cornell

Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don't know... — Jospeh Conrad

But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for. — Robert Falcon Scott