Roman Abramovich

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.

When I started to make more or less serious money – for those times – then, of course, I wanted to show everyone that life is different: it’s a new kind of life; we are earning this money. We wanted to pay taxes and live honestly.

To tell the truth I cannot call my childhood bad. In your childhood you can’t compare things: one eats carrots, one eats candy, both taste good. As a child you cannot tell the difference.

I was never involved in arms trading. In the Russian Federation, arms trading is the prerogative of the state.

I’ve never tried to impose pressure on the authority of the government through my business achievements. I cannot tell you what the others were doing.

I decided to sit quietly and do business and don’t stick your neck out and tell everybody everything belongs to me. That would only cause problems for myself. Therefore I never told these stories or declared all these things to anyone.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.

There should be rivalry between men and between business.

Salesmanship, too, is an art; the perfection of its technique requires study and practice.

I never went to business school. I was just bumbling through a lot of my life. I was like the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.

Only one thing makes prosperity, and that is work.

America is not a land of money but of wealth-not a land of rich people, but of successful workers.

We get real results only in proportion to the real values we give.

The greatest teacher I know is the job itself.

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

A store’s best advertisement is the service its goods render, for upon such service rest the future, the good-will, of an organization.

If the boss stands in the way of men getting what they earn, he is not fit to be boss.

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.

We started learning ourselves, understanding ourselves, reading, researching, going around the world and looking at what was defined as the very best.

The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.