Business adventures Quotes

“expectation of an event creates a much deeper impression … than the event itself.”—de”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“I don’t think money makes much difference, as long as you have enough.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“If you’re not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“Any board-room sitter with a taste for Wall Street lore has heard of the retort that J. P. Morgan the Elder is supposed to have made to a naïve acquaintance who had ventured to ask the great man what the market was going to do. “It will fluctuate,” replied Morgan dryly.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“we may see another speculative buildup followed by another crash, and so on until God makes people less greedy.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“There is no possible protection from technology except by technology,” he wrote. “When you create a new environment with one phase of technology,”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“To set high goals, to have almost unattainable aspirations, to imbue people with the belief that they can be achieved—these are as important as the balance sheet, perhaps more”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“Why should I want to have a lot of copies of this and that lying around? Nothing but clutter in the office, a temptation to prying eyes, and a waste of good paper.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“they were “very clever in inventing reasons” for a sudden rise or fall in stock prices,”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“11:14, twenty minutes; at 11:35, twenty-eight minutes; at 11:58,”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“doldrums, not only did prices continue to decline”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“It is foolish to think that you can withdraw from the Exchange after you have tasted the sweetness of the honey.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“Whether the nostalgia of the Edsel boys for the Edsel runs to the humorous or to the tragic, it is a thought-provoking phenomenon. Maybe it means merely that they miss the limelight they first basked in and later squirmed in, or maybe it means that a time has come when—as in Elizabethan drama but seldom before in American business—failure can have a certain grandeur that success never knows.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“One of de la Vega’s observations about the Amsterdam traders was that they were “very clever in inventing reasons” for a sudden rise or fall in stock prices,”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“the Piggly Wiggly Stores in 1919, had most of the standard traits of the flamboyant American promoters—suspect generosity, a knack for attracting publicity, love of ostentation, and so on—but he also had some much less common traits, notably a remarkably vivid style, both in speech and writing, and a gift, of which he may or may not have been aware, for comedy. But like so many great men before him, he had a weakness, a tragic flaw. It was that he insisted on thinking of himself as a hick, a boob, and a sucker, and, in doing so, he sometimes became all three. This unlikely fellow was the man who engineered”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“American Telephone & Telegraph, the largest company of them all,”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“In the stock market, however, as de la Vega points out, “the news [as such] is often of little value;” in the short run, the mood of the investors is what counts.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“Every dog has one free bite. A dog cannot be presumed to be vicious until he has proved that he is by biting someone.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“He who sells what isn’t his’n must buy it back or go to prison.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“collecting 10 per cent on high incomes and lower rates on lower incomes constituted undue discrimination against wealth.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“In industry, you take a bump now and then, but you bounce back as long as you don’t get defeated inside.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“hard-working Krafve explains gamely that when a company”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“The income-tax law in toto has virtually no defenders, even though most fair-minded students of the subject agree that its effect over the half century that it has been in force has been to bring about a huge and healthy redistribution of wealth.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, contemplating the communication problem in a nonindustrial context, has said, “Actually, the breakdown is between the person and himself. If you’re not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?” Suppose, purely as a hypothesis, that the owner of a company who orders his subordinates to obey the antitrust laws has such poor communication with himself that he does not really know whether he wants the order to be complied with or not. If his order is disobeyed, the resulting price-fixing may benefit his company’s coffers; if it is obeyed, then he has done the right thing. In the first instance, he is not personally implicated in any wrongdoing, while in the second he is positively involved in right doing. What, after all, can he lose? It is perhaps reasonable to suppose that such an executive might communicate his uncertainty more forcefully than his order. Possibly yet another foundation grantee should have a look at the reverse of communication failure, where he might discover that messages the sender does not even realize he is sending sometimes turn out to have got across only too effectively.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“This preoccupation with the difficulty of getting a thought out of one head and into another is something the industrialists share with a substantial number of intellectuals and creative writers, more and more of whom seem inclined to regard communication, or the lack of it, as one of the greatest problems not just of industry but of humanity.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“(“The expectation of an event creates a much deeper impression … than the event itself.”—de la Vega.)”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“On the first day of his duel with the bears, Saunders, operating behind his mask of brokers, bought 33,000 shares of Piggly Wiggly, mostly from the short sellers; within a week he had brought the total to 105,000—more than half of the 200,000 shares outstanding. Meanwhile, ventilating his emotions at the cost of tipping his hand, he began running a series of advertisements in which he vigorously and pungently told the readers of Southern and Western newspapers what he thought of Wall Street. “Shall the gambler rule?” he demanded in one of these effusions. “On a white horse he rides. Bluff is his coat of mail and thus shielded is a yellow heart. His helmet is deceit, his spurs clink with treachery, and the hoofbeats of his horse thunder destruction. Shall good business flee? Shall it tremble with fear? Shall it be the loot of the speculator?” On Wall Street, Livermore went on buying Piggly Wiggly.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“THE game of Corner—for in its heyday it was a game, a high-stakes gambling game, pure and simple, embodying a good many of the characteristics of poker—was one phase of the endless Wall Street contest between bulls, who want the price of a stock to go up, and bears, who want it to go down.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“Furthermore, I found it seductive. In fact, I was in danger of becoming a slave. Business has its man-eating side, and part of the man-eating side is that it’s so absorbing.”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

“Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing, because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher,”
― John Brooks, Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street