James Cash Penney

No business can succeed in any great degree without being properly organized.

Clock watchers never seem to be having a good time.

Success cannot come from standstill men. Methods change and men must change with them.

There’s no better friend to any merchant than a fair competitor.

The well-satisfied customer will bring the repeat sale that counts.

Theory is splendid but until put into practice, it is valueless.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose… the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

In New York and Los Angeles, you can throw your car keys to the valet and he parks it. Same in Hong Kong and Singapore, the service is off the scale. In London it’s sub-standard to abysmal.

London has got better as it’s become more international – you only have to look at the quality of the restaurants to see how improved it’s become.

Edison, to a greater extent than has ever been recognized, is the father of American industrial methods.

We do not hire a man’s history, we hire the man.

I have no Napoleonic dream. I’m just hard-working and pragmatic.

My mother taught me to love my work. I learned everything about business from her.

The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.

When you are in real estate, you are going to make some mistakes.

I get my design inspiration from Christian Dior and Chanel.

Nations are great as they are prosperous as they are industrious as they are just.

Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.

My motto is: Always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially – like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.