American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.

—Margaret Halsey

morality business selling selflessness

About Margaret Halsey

Margaret Halsey (February 13, 1910 – February 4, 1997) was an American writer who lived in the United Kingdom for a short time. Her first book With Malice Toward Some (1938) grew out of her experiences there. It was a witty and humorous bestseller, selling 600,000 copies. It won one...

More quotations from Margaret Halsey

Life… punishes those who try to compartmentalize it. Thus if, for any reason whatsoever, moral standards are conspicuously and unprecedentedly breached in one area of society, such as the political, it will follow as the night the day that those standards will start collapsing all down the line—in sports, entertainment, education, the armed forces, business, and government.

—Margaret Halsey

People coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.

—Margaret Halsey

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

—Margaret Halsey

Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.

—Margaret Halsey

reality power change creation commitment

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.

—Margaret Halsey

aggression skepticism competion

More quotations tagged with “business”

In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear.

—John C. Dvorak

fear time business computers fun

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.

—Michel de Montaigne

nature business

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

—Mahatma Gandhi

friends religion enemies business friendliness

I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently, worked hard, spent honestly, saved honestly, gave honest value for money, put back more than they took out, and told no lies. This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.

—Anita Roddick

honesty religion money business

I gathered my shoes and wallet on the other side of the metal detector and took a last glance at my father, who was still there, still waving.That mangled finger had always been a symbol of his shortcomings and deformities to me, but now I saw it was also a testament to all that he'd sacrificed for our family.He'd lost that trigger finger building the business that had fed and clothed me. I imagined he was not only waving me goodbye but waving me forward with that symbol of his own woundedness.

—Shozan Jack Haubner

family sacrifice business fatherhood

History

26 Jan 2015 Added