J. Paul Getty

Today's dissenters mainly focus their attention and expend their energies on the most inconsequential of trivia. ...Allegedly serious intellectuals quibble endlessly over such ridiculous trivialities...In the meantime, the public is lulled into a perilous somnolence, spoon-fed pap, and palpable untruths, many of which are turned out by special-interest and pressure groups and well organized propaganda machines.

You must not only learn to live with tension, you must seek it out. You must learn to thrive on stress.

In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.

The #1 guideline to success is you must be in business for yourself. When you work for someone else, you sell your time at wholesale to your employer, who then re-sells it at retail to the customer.

Patience; this is the greatest business asset. Wait for the right time to make your moves.

There is only one way to make a great deal of money; and that is in a business of your own.

To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business.

If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.

There may be some substitute for hard facts, but if there is, I have no idea what it can be.

Once you have made it, you will understand that any business is limited in the challenges it offers. You will want and need other games to play, so you will look for other ventures to hold your interest.

Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?

...Americans...automatically equate dissension with disloyalty. They view any criticism of our existing social, economic, and political forms, as sedition and subversion. ...(" The growing reluctance of Americans to criticize, and their increasing tendency to condemn those who, in ever dwindling numbers, will still voice dissent") is disturbing, deplorable, and truly dangerous.

The key to wealth is to learn how to make money while you sleep

Build wealth as a by product of your business success. If wealth is your only objective in business, you will probably fail.

Wealth is only a benefit of the game of money. If you win, the money will be there.

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavour. The beauty endures. A work of art lives...through the generations and centuries.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.

Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.

Oil is like a wild animal. Whoever captures it has it.

Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.

If you can actually count your money, then you're not a rich man.