Let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, the lifeblood of prices and jobs.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

It’s not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts.

When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn’t set out to build a business empire… For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that’s going to make a real difference to other people’s lives.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus‘ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

Well, I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

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

Finding good partners is the key to success in anything: in business, in marriage and, especially, in investing.

Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

No one has a greater asset for his business than a man’s pride in his work.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

If you like a person you say ‚let’s go into business together.‘ Man is a social animal after all, but such partnerships are fraught with danger.

If you want to thrive in today’s economy, you must challenge the status quo and get the financial education necessary to succeed.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

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.

Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

I’ve found that men I’ve dated who are in the same business can be really competitive. I’ve found a great group of girlfriends in the same business who aren’t competitive, but a few times guys have started comparing careers and it has been… challenging.

A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that is generated in the crowd and on stage. It’s my favorite part of the business, live concerts.

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

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

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

We can choose a future where we export more products and outsource fewer jobs. After a decade that was defined by what we bought and borrowed, we’re getting back to basics, and doing what America has always done best: We’re making things again.

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.

Socialists tend to want to pay people more money to do less work, and capitalists tend to want to provide better products at better prices.

Pricey oil makes clear that wealth really is energy in various forms.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

I love big business!

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.

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

But, having a perfume and license, in general, is a financial necessity. A designer must, to reap back the money spent on prototypes and all that sort of thing.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.

For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.

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.

If you spend your life competing with business men, what do you have? A bank account and ulcers!

As a precious metal, silver is also money.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

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

Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.

Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.

We get paid for bringing value to the market place.

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.

If I have cash and I can’t figure a way to put it into real estate or my business, I hold it in gold and silver.

Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury.

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.

The first time I stepped on an NBA court I became a businessman.

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

I just think people should invest in the world. Don’t invest in fashion, but invest in the world.

I do know that throughout history, all paper money has eventually come back to its true value, which is zero.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.

Remember that credit is money.

In the simplest terms, inflation occurs when there’s too much money in the system. On the flip side, deflation occurs when there are too few dollars in circulation.

Never spend your money before you have earned it.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.