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Profit Quotes

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Profit Quotes

“Great losses are great lessons.”

“Millions of business people are each constantly forced to choose between their desire to not be a bad person and their desire to be a good business person, that is to say, to make as much money as they possibly can by maximizing their revenue while minimizing the cost of producing whatever it is that they sell.”

“The smell of the sweat is not sweet, but the fruit of the sweat is very sweet.”

“In the business people with expertise, experience and evidence will make more profitable decisions than people with instinct, intuition and imagination.”

“I sometimes think as if I am corporate media; I put myself in their shoes: If I could profit off a situation, how would I spin it for the maximum amount of traffic yet still be taken seriously? This, I believe when listening, reading, or watching, helps to discern truth from fact and decipher fact from fiction. It helps to weed out the sensationalism, and you gain a more accurate depiction of the world's actual condition.”

“This revolution of values must go beyond traditional capitalism and Communism. We must honestly admit that capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few, and has encourage smallhearted men to become cold and conscienceless so that, like Dives before Lazarus, they are unmoved by suffering, poverty-stricken humanity. The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more I-centered than thou-centered. Equally, Communism reduces men to a cog in the wheel of the state. The Communist may object, saying that in Marxian theory the state is an “interim reality” that will “wither away” when the classless society emerges. True—in theory; but it is also true that, while the state lasts, it is an end in itself. Man is a means to that end. He has no inalienable rights. His only rights are derived from, and conferred by, the state. Under such a system the fountain of freedom runs dry. Restricted are man’s liberties of press and assembly, his freedom to vote and his freedom to listen and to read. Truth is found neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical Communism. Each represents a partial truth. Capitalism fails to see the truth in collectivism. Communism fails to see the truth in individualism. Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of Communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.”

“Earning money from, and supporting, a system that keeps these people in poverty in the first place and then gives them some of the profits in the form of "strings-attached" aid or World Bank and IMF loans is no more ridiculous than Shell or Esso giving Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth £10,000 to help clear up the destruction that they inevitably cause. Would it not be better not to cause the destruction in the first place?”

“I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me ever more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism had greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system: capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity—thus capitalism can lead to a practical materialism that is as pernicious as the materialism taught by communism.”

“Hawkins' mission was to instill Euro-American values and practices in Indigenous peoples - including the profit motive, privatization of property, debt, accumulation of wealthy by a few, and slavery - allowing settlers to gain the land and assimilate the Muskogees.”

“For their never-ending endeavours to obtain or retain wealth, countries desperately need companies, because they—unlike most human beings—have the means of production, and human beings, because they—unlike all companies—have the means of reproduction.”

“*Prostitution* is a euphemism for rape incidents that the victim and the economy profits from.”

“Any government that places profit before people is pure evil.”

“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.”

“I sat on the Advisory Board of the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit. IT was during a board meeting in 2012 that I first heard about B Lab and its innovative business model, the B Corporation (B Corp). There were about 600 companies who were in the B Corp community at that time; today there are more than 2,000 in 50 countries from 130 industries. They have one unifying goal: people using business as a force for good™. This has been a passion of mine since I worked at Henry Miller in the 1980s and back then felt we were all alone. Many of our peer executives from other companies disagreed with our people-centered participative management system, our commitment to be good stewards of the environment, and our engagement in communities; some went as far as calling us socialist. They believed that the single aim of business was maximizing shareholder value and they were slaves of that aim. So I was elated to talk with Jay Coen Gilbert, a cofounder of B Lab, and learn more about B Corps and his personal story that led him to commit to going on this journey.”

“For most of human history, the only instrument needed to induce employees to complete their duties energetically and adroitly was the whip. But the rules of employment had to be rewritten with the emergence of tasks whose adequate performance required their protagonists to be a significant degree content, rather than simply terrified or resigned. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to remove brain tumours, draw up binding legal documents or sell condominiums with convincing energy could not profitably be sullen or resentful, morose or angry, the mental well-being of employees commenced to be a supreme object of managerial concern.”

“Mostly, in the restaurant business, [managers] are former cooks still capable of pinch-hitting in the kitchen, just as in hotels they are likely to be former clerks, and paid a salary of only about $400 a week. But everyone knows they have crossed over to the other side, which is, crudely put, corporate as opposed to human. Cooks want to prepare tasty meals, servers want to serve them graciously, but managers are there for only one reason--to make sure that money is made for some theoretical entity, the corporation, which exists far away in Chicago or New York, if a corporation can be said to have a physical existence at all.”

“The economists tell us, to be sure, that those labourers who have been rendered superfluous by machinery find new avenues of employment, They dare not assert directly that the same labourers that have been discharged find situations in new branches of labour. Facts cry out too loudly against this lie. Strictly speaking, they only maintain that new means of employment will be found for other sections of the working class; for example, for that portion of the young generation of labourers who were about to enter upon that branch of industry which had just been abolished. Of course, this is a great satisfaction to the disabled labourers. There will be no lack of fresh exploitable blood and muscle for the Messrs. Capitalists—the dead may bury their dead. This consolation seems to be intended more for the comfort of the capitalists themselves than of their labourers. If the whole class of the wage-labourer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labour, ceases to be capital!”

“Fear is location specific. Which is not something people from Bent Tree usually learn because they rarely leave. But if you're not from somewhere rural, gunshots have a different connotation. Any bang-bang in the city and your adrenaline spikes. You lock the door. You pray. At the Lodges, gunshots are like crickets; you don't hear them every day, but nearly. They are the sound of industry, and industry is money, and money makes you smile.”

“Humility is a virtue of the heavenly, not arrogance. Are we the most superior beast on earth? No, not in strength and not in intelligence. It is very arrogant to assume that we are the most intelligent species when we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Both rats and monkeys have been shown to learn from error, yet we have not. More people have died in the name of religion than any other cause on earth. Is massacring God’s creations really serving God – or the devil? And what father would want to see his children constantly divided and fighting? What God would allow a single human life to be sacrificed for monetary gain? Again, the Creator or the devil?”