Richard Branson

Well, I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

Life is a helluva lot more fun if you say yes rather than no.

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.

It is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside.

If you’re bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don’t think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really.

Listen – it makes you sound smarter.

If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

Our friendship was based on my payouts. That wasn’t a friendship when – as, for example, it’s me, my friends, we are friends for many years, and it doesn’t matter for me what the position is, where they work; we simply are friends. And with Mr. Berezovsky, our friendship was based on my payoffs.

I will build a motor car for the great multitude – constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. So low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one-and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.

I cannot remember a time when the Golden Rule was not my motto and precept, the torch that guided my footsteps.

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

For a long time now, I have believed that industry and agriculture are natural partners and that they should begin to recognize and practice their partnership. Each of them is suffering from ailments which the other can cure. Agriculture needs a wider andsteadier market; industrial workers need more steadier jobs. Can each be made to supply what the other needs? I think so. The link between is Chemistry. In the vicinity of Dearborn we are farming twenty thousand acres for everything from sunflowers to soy beans. We pass the crops through our laboratory to learn how they may be used in the manufacture of motor cars and, thus provide an industrial market for the farmers’ products.

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

Ridiculous yachts and private planes and big limousines won’t make people enjoy life more, and it sends out terrible messages to the people who work for them. It would be so much better if that money was spent in Africa – and it’s about getting a balance.

Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence.

If you change anything about the way you approach selling, the thing that would make the biggest difference would be your attitude, your attitude toward your customer, your service, the benefits of your products, your employer, and yourself.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

I don’t know the exact details of his background but from what I have read Mr. Abramovich had a very humble start in life and has made his own luck.

To be most effective in sales today, it’s imperative to drop your ‘sales’ mentality and start working with your prospects as if they’ve already hired you.