Malcolm Forbes quotes:

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  • The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

  • Thinking well to be wise: planning well, wiser: doing well wisest and best of all.

  • Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

  • Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.

  • The best vision is insight.

  • Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.

  • Failure is success if we learn from it.

  • Presence is more than just being there.

  • The biggest mistake people make in life is not trying to make a living at doing what they most enjoy.

  • It's more fun to arrive a conclusion than to justify it.

  • Success follows doing what you want to do. There is no other way to be successful.

  • When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.

  • It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.

  • People who never get carried away should be.

  • Personal & Confidential. Letters so marked should be. When the contents are only printed matter, though, the minifrauder succeeds in sowing illwill & ire.

  • SM is an abbreviation of both stock market and sadomasochism-- and there are those who think they are one and the same.

  • At the heart of any good business is a chief executive officer with one.

  • Men who never get carried away should be.

  • Age isn't important until you run out of it.

  • All work and no play makes jack. With enough jack, Jack needn't be a dull boy.

  • The more sympathy you give, the less you need.

  • Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.

  • If you have a job without aggravations, you don't have a job.

  • Clout is something some seem to have-until they try exercising it.

  • To measure the man, measure his heart.

  • Since you have to do the things you have to do, be wise enough to do some of the things you want to do.

  • The best buy by way of management is brains-at any price.

  • An inadequate chief executive officer's time at the top is always too long no matter how short.

  • Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it.

  • What's an expert? I read somewhere, that the more a man knows, the more he knows, he doesn't know. So I suppose one definition of an expert would be someone who doesn't admit out loud that he knows enough about a subject to know he doesn't really know how much.

  • Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat.

  • If you don't know what to do with many of the papers piled on your desk, stick a dozen colleagues initials on them and pass them along. When in doubt, route.

  • There is never enough time, unless you're serving it.

  • If you expect nothing, you're apt to be surprised. You'll get it.

  • After the fact, our hearts always go out to the fallen Goliaths. Yet we invariably root for their Davids. Until they're winners.

  • If you've had a good time playing the game, you're a winner even if you lose.

  • The hardest time to tell: when to stop.

  • Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he's hired to do.

  • If the shoe fits you're lucky.

  • For some of us it seems like yesterday when Ike was in the White House, the U.S. Senate censured Joe McCarthy, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public school was unconstitutional.

  • The dumbest people I know are those who know it all.

  • As you get older there shouldn't be anything you won't try. The payoff is that you open up whole new avenues that are fun. It's a misinterpretation of life to live it only in preparation for the next one. To subordinate the one you've got to an indefinite next round is foolish. It's a waste of this life not to live this life. What's next is anybody's guess.

  • People who say that money isn't the most important thing in the world are usually broke.

  • Money isn't everything as long as you have enough.

  • I made my money the old-fashioned way. I was very nice to a wealthy relative right before he died.

  • Putting pen to paper lights more fire than matches ever will

  • One thing that previous practice doesn't always make perfect: Marriage.

  • When one seeks assurance, there's none from those who respond, Now, don't you worry about a thing. If you weren't worried, you wouldn't have asked. If you are concerned, it's nice to know that those you query are, too. I'll take a worrier any day over a platitudinous reassurer.

  • Re raising kids: Love, without discipline, isn't.

  • You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

  • Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.

  • It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.

  • The art of conversation lies in listening

  • To live long and achieve happiness, cultivate the art of radiating happiness.

  • What about the poor salesman who is calling into the office from the corner saloon instead of the home sickbed he claims he is in?

  • On New York's Palm restaurant: Their steaks are often good, but the lobsters-with claws the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger's forearms-are as glazed and tough as most of the customers.

  • Keeping score of old scores and scars, getting even and one-upping, always makes you less than you are.

  • Old age is not for sissies.

  • It is never too late to learn.

  • It's never too late to learn.

  • The only unforgivable sin: Being unforgiving.

  • Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.

  • Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

  • Let your children go if you want to keep them.

  • When what we are is what we want to be, that's happiness.

  • . . . the most difficult thing asked by our young is not our earnings but our ears.

  • A big cigar in a young face requires the best of both.

  • A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours.

  • A gun in the hand is worth any number being tested.

  • A hug's a happy thing while a shrug's so often destructive.

  • A little reciprocity goes a long way.

  • A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective.

  • A lot of money doesn't make anyone more often right. It just makes him harder to correct.

  • A Tax Loophole: A deduction that the other guy gets.

  • Advice: It's more fun to give than to receive.

  • After 40, one's face begins to tell more than one's tongue.

  • All too often we say of a man doing a good job that he is indispensable. A flattering canard, as so many disillusioned and retired and fired have discovered when the world seems to keep on turning without them. In business, a man can come nearest to indispensability by being dispensable in his current job. How can a man move up to new responsibilities if he is the only one able to handle his present tasks? It matters not how small or large the job you now have, if you have trained no one to do it as well, you're not available; you've made your promotion difficult if not impossible.

  • Anticipating is more fun than recollecting.

  • Any marriage that survives a big wedding can probably survive.

  • Are you not justified in feeling inferior, when you seek to cover it up with arrogance and insolence?

  • As you get older, don't slow down. Speed up. There's less time left!

  • At today's prices for medicines, doctors and hospitals-if the latter are available at any price-only millionaires can afford to be hurt or sick and pay for it. Very few people want socialized medicine in the U.S. But pressure for it is going to appear with the same hurricane force as the demand for pollution control if the medicine men and hospital operators don't take soon some Draconian measures... At the present rate of doctor fees and hospital costs under Medicare and Medicaid plans [taxpayers] are shovelling in billions with nothing but escalation in sight.

  • Authority's for sharing only when the sharer is sure of his (or hers).

  • Blaming destiny is a poor out for those who don't reach desired destinations.

  • By the time we've made it, we've had it.

  • Can you understand why the Congress, most states and most cities refuse to pass legislation requiring the registration and licensing of any and all guns? For the life of me, I can't. We must register our cars and be licensed to drive. In many places we must get licenses for dogs and even bicycles. Being required to register firearms and show the competence and capacity to handle them hardly seems unreasonable, hardly seems an infringement of freedom. What is it that blocks such legislation? Why do they block it? How are they able to block it?

  • Compliment others on the virtues they have; and they're not half as pleased as being complimented for the ones they don't have.

  • Crime in the city streets is more than a political issue. It's a too rampant fact.... In Indianapolis they have come up with a most sensible, affordable approach to the problem. Policemen are assigned their police patrol cars for personal use after hours. They are encouraged to use the police car while taking the family shopping, to the movies, and everywhere one takes one's family. As a result, says the Police Chief's assistant, we may have as many as 400 cars on the street instead of 100 or so per shift. [And] the presence of the police car obviously indicates the proximity of policemen.

  • Daydreams are doable. The turn-on is not in scale, spectacle, or cost. It's in the doing. Anything you haven't done is an adventure. Wanting to is the principal requirement. If you can do and want to, don't not. In short, while alive, live.

  • Drinking more often brings out the best in the good than the worst in the bad.

  • Economists' unanimity that bad business is ahead is the most reassuring news possible. It's very unlikely that this will be the one time they're right.

  • Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

  • Enlightening editorial writers is even more difficult than educating educators.

  • Everybody has to be somebody to somebody to be anybody.

  • Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

  • Food may be essential as fuel for the body, but good food is fuel for the soul.

  • For corporations to be bedfellows with the arts is good business for both. The architecture that houses a company is a more visible statement than the president's in the annual report. Ditto interiors, particularly of offices and sometimes, dramatically, in plants. For solvent businesses, support of community cultural undertakings in music, drama, dance creates great goodwill. Also, the existence of such activities is often important to the executives and their families that companies want to keep or attract to keep.

  • Give naught, get same. Give much, get same.

  • He who hesitates is sometimes wise.

  • He who says he never needs help, most does.

  • Hoarding one's hurts hurts only the hoarder.

  • Hopeless cases: Executives who assert themselves by saying No when they should say Yes.

  • How in heck are they handling their surplus population in Hell these days? Maybe by the time you and I are in the queue there won't be room for us.

  • How to fail: Try too hard.

  • How to get taken: Spend most of your time making sure you're not.

  • How to succeed? Try hard enough.

  • How would you know what happy is if you've never been otherwise.

  • I don't think anybody can be a success who doesn't like what they do. [But it's] no job if it has no challenge; there's nothing to it if there are no problems. The essential thing is liking what you're doing.

  • I don't waste too much time philosophizing about wealth, I just recommend it to everyone.

  • I haven't a clue about the biology or the psychology involved when a person dissolves into tears, but it is quite fascinating to note what turns them on. There are wives who can cascade over a late husband or a burned dinner, and equally pour tears of joy over a new bonnet or a renovated bathroom.... A while ago I took a ship back from Europe. Amid the tumbling confetti ... I found myself misty-eyed watching a young lady waving a tearful farewell to her boyfriend on the dock. I couldn't figure out if I was crying at her plight, or in delight that he wasn't coming along with us.

  • I hope a start at getting some oil out of the enormous Alaska field isn't indefinitely mired in a bureaucratic morass as a result of our national concern for the ecology. This concern must not be so misguided, misdirected, misused that it serves to stop economic growth, to bankrupt companies, to stifle new development, new jobs, new horizons. In fighting new pollution and stemming present pollution, exciting, sometimes costly means and methods exist and others will evolve. But blanket legislative naysaying to expanding power and energy sources is stupid, self-defeating.

  • I make more money selling advice than following it

  • I think legislative assaults on motorcyclists are totally emotionally, disproportionate and totally unfair....they're instigated and implemented by people who know nothing about motorcycling, but have a prejudice. It's easy to curb the freedoms of others when you see no immediate impact on your own.

  • I think the foremost quality - there's no success without it - is really loving what you do. If you love it, you do it well, and there's no success if you don't do well what you're working at.

  • I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS.

  • I was loaded with sheer ability, spelled i-n-h-e-r-i-t-a-n-c-e.

  • If I owned any of these Hot New Issues that have doubled, tripled, quintupled or umptupled within days and in some cases hours after they were issued, I most certainly would grab my fabulous windfall, thank my lucky stars and invest the money. It's utter nonsense to think any newly issued stock is really worth two, ten or 20 times the [offering] price.... A management so stupid as to sell shares [cheap], and an underwriter so obtuse as not to discern the real value, together would provide reason enough for a sensible man to get rid of his shares.

  • If you can read and don't, you're dumb.

  • If you do not know what you're doing stacked on his desk, a dozen colleagues Initially sticks with a large number of papers and pass them. In case of doubt, the way in.

  • If you don't know what you want to do, it's harder to do it.

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