Richard Branson

Listen – it makes you sound smarter.

I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

A touch of the jitters sharpens the mind, gets the adrenaline flowing and helps you to focus.

I was dyslexic, I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I – if I’m not interested in something, I don’t grasp it.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

We, we – as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.

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

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

In the long run people are going to buy the cheapest and the best article no matter where it is made.

No one should buy on reputation alone. They should come and see it and inspect it, feel it and touch it.

Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn’t smooth. You’ll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don’t believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don’t give up.

In business, cooperation is essential to success.

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

Nobody’s ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there’s some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.

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

[To his ex-entertainment lawyer Eric Eisner who resigned from the presidency of The David Geffen Company in 1991 just as a deal was about to be made with some Japanese] Keep your stock. [Eric sold it.]

Should I give up my career at this point in my life… and put all my marbles in Laura’s [Nyro] basket?

What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.

First and foremost, I’m a real estate person. And that’s what I love the most.

The Model T blazed the way for the motor industry and started the movement for good roads everywhere. It is still the pioneer car in many parts of the world which are just beginning to be motorized.