If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences.
- Topic: Business, Leadership, Society
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Ayn Rand
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.
The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.
A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes…loses its moral rights to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.
If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
Words are a lens to focus one's mind.
Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.
You don’t have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production.
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In the ordinary business of life, industry can do anything which genius can do, and very many things which it cannot.
The Golden Rule finds no limit of application in business.
While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
The golden rule for every business man is this: ‘Put yourself in your customer’s place.’
Keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
A business absolutely devoted to service will have one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.
If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.
You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.
Keep in mind that the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the door.
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.
Only 3 things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and under performance. Everything else requires leadership.
The first method of estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
My own art is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside all rules and demands of society.
...the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be...The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
We signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to believe in the goodness of people.
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
O beautiful for spacious skies, For Amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!
When civil fury first grew high, and men fell out they knew not why.
Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
This I learned in Auschwitz: There are only two races. The race of the decent and the race of the indecent.
Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.
