I love big business!

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

If there’s one thing that’s certain in business, it’s uncertainty.

What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high, people who have jobs see their incomes go up, businesses make big profits. But they’re learned to do more with less, and so they don’t hire.

Most businesses think that product is the most important thing, but without great leadership, mission and a team that deliver results at a high level, even the best product won’t make a company successful.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

Concentration is my motto – first honesty, then industry, then concentration.

In my opinion, baseball is as big a business as anything there is. It has to be a business, the way it is conducted.

I just figured out that if I gave my all into this game – if I put everything into the fight business – then I would eventually run the fight business.

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

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.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

The dollar has lost over 90 percent of its value since the Fed was created.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

I like Mr. Gorbachev, we can do business together.

I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

When I started my last business, I didn’t receive a paycheck for 13 months. The average person can’t handle that pressure.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

By reading, you learn through others‘ experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

From my very first day as an entrepreneur, I’ve felt the only mission worth pursuing in business is to make people’s lives better.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

As in nature, all is ebb and tide, all is wave motion, so it seems that in all branches of industry, alternating currents – electric wave motion – will have the sway.

When I was born, the economy wasn’t in a great state; it was the Depression, and my father had to be quick to try and find work.

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

I’m touring the world, not doing nothing against the law, getting money to feed my family. I got employees that have felonies, and they can’t get jobs. They work for me.

My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.

No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit.

Industry need not wish.

From 1945 to 1974, the Western world – including America – was more socialistic than capitalistic, more pro-labor than pro-business.

I’m always amazed at how many people assume a business has to lose money before it makes money.

If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.

I wasn’t born a natural entrepreneur. I had to be trained.

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

Any time an investment company has to spend heavily on advertising, it’s probably a bad business in which to invest.

If you’re worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it’s almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

And what’s interesting, and I don’t think a lot of Americans understand this fact, is that, one, most new jobs are created by small businesses; two, most small businesses pay tax at the individual income tax, or many small businesses pay tax there.

With Virgin, I’ve just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.

A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.

While still working for others, your goal at some point must be to carve out little areas that you can operate on your own, cultivating entrepreneurial skills.

To keep the business going, you gotta keep it boomin‘.

If my businesses or my investments are not profitable, then I don’t eat. And I like to eat.

Now you have a choice: we can give more tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, or we can start rewarding companies that open new plants and train new workers and create new jobs here, in the United States of America.

As I followed my dream – stayed in-Spirit, that is, inspired – I made more money in the first year after I gave up my employment than I had made in the previous 35 years of my life.

If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents‘ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I did not take the oath I have just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world’s strongest economy.

Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.

The woman who can create her own job is the woman who will win fame and fortune.