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.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

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.

I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.

When times are bad is when the real entrepreneurs emerge.

For me, it’s about becoming a mogul, owning my own projects, and establishing myself as a funding producer. That’s what’s big to me. The movies and all that stuff are great, but the fact that I’m in a position to do what I want to do, however I want to do it and when I want to do it is bigger.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

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.

I always wanted to have a headphone line but I feel like I’m going to do more than just headphones eventually, but we want to wake the world up right now with this.

I would hear stories about Steve Jobs and feel like he was at 100 percent exactly what he wanted to do, but I’m sure even a Steve Jobs has compromised. Even a Rick Owens has compromised. You know, even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’re being compromised till after the fact, and that’s what you regret.

In ‚Unfair Advantage: The Power of Financial Education‘ and ‚Why A Students Work for C Students,‘ I reveal the secrets of the wealthy and what schools will never teach you about money.

Overcoming fear is the first step to success for entrepreneurs. The winners all exemplify that, and the hard work and commitment they have shown underlines what is needed to set up a business.

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.

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

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.

I own my own company, so I’ve never had businessmen telling me what to do or getting worried if something doesn’t sell. I’ve always had my own access to the public, because I started off making my clothes for a little shop and so I’ve always had people buying them.

I’m really interested in smells. I think I’d like to own a perfumery someday.

We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that’s something we’re proud of.

Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.

I’ve actually taken companies public, I’ve actually busted companies, I’ve actually gone broke.

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 think I’ve got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn’t read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anything and everything that he had to work with.

At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?

I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.

The first mistake in public business is the going into it.

There’s no reason why I can’t be a mogul. When I step into a room and I’m there to have a conversation, if it pertains to business, I want to be respected as a guy who knows what he’s talking about. And that, to me, holds more weight than anything else.

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.

I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

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.

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

We get paid for bringing value to the market place.

A true capitalist doesn’t have a job, because other people and other people’s money work for them.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.

There’s no better place in the world for technology start-ups than Silicon Valley; there’s such an incredible well of talent and capital and resources. The whole system is set up to foster the creation of new companies.

Starting a business is not for everyone. Starting a business – I’d say, number one is have a high pain threshold.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

Be willing to use yourself to get out there and put the company on the market. If you have to make a fool of yourself, make a fool of yourself, but make sure that you end up on the front pages, not the back pages. In time, it’s possible that your company will stand out from the crowd, and you’ll be successful.

For a successful entrepreneur it can mean extreme wealth. But with extreme wealth comes extreme responsibility. And the responsibility for me is to invest in creating new businesses, create jobs, employ people, and to put money aside to tackle issues where we can make a difference.

I was approached about having my own network many, many years ago. There were some people who wanted to start up a network, and I didn’t want to get that involved in the business aspect of it.

As an entrepreneur, I have been known for taking risks throughout my career, but leaving the European Union is not one of the risks I would want the U.K. to take – not as an investor, not as a father, and not as a grandfather. I am deeply concerned about the impact of leaving.

If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn’t have to advertise them.

It’s no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.

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

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

We go to school to learn to work hard for money. I write books and create products that teach people how to have money work hard for them.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

I’ve never gone into business to make money. Every Virgin product and service has been made into a reality to make a positive difference in people’s lives. And by focusing on the happiness of our customers, we have been able to build a successful group of companies.

It wasn’t until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.

Warren Buffet told me once and he said always follow your gut. When you have that gut feeling, you have to go with don’t go back on it.

It’s rare for a startup to make money immediately, so you need to make sure that you have enough saved or that you have another income stream that can support you.

My early business ventures included growing Christmas trees and breeding birds.

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.

Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.

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