J. Paul Getty Quotes - Page 2

I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.

You must not only learn to live with tension, you must seek it out. You must learn to thrive on stress.

There are always opportunities through which businessmen can profit handsomely if they will only recognize and seize them.

To build wealth today, you must be in your own business.

To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business.

A sense of thrift is essential to success in business. The businessman must discipline himself to practice economy whenever possible, in his personal life as well as his business affairs.

There are no safeguards that can protect the emotional investor from himself.

Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.

In business, as in politics, it is never easy to go against the beliefs and attitudes held by the majority. The businessman who moves counter to the tide of prevailing opinion must expect to be obstructed, derided and damned.

The man who comes up with a means for doing or producing almost anything better, faster or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips.

The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.

Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?

Today's dissenters mainly focus their attention and expend their energies on the most inconsequential of trivia. ...Allegedly serious intellectuals quibble endlessly over such ridiculous trivialities...In the meantime, the public is lulled into a perilous somnolence, spoon-fed pap, and palpable untruths, many of which are turned out by special-interest and pressure groups and well organized propaganda machines.

Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.

There are one hundred men seeking security to one able man who is willing to risk his fortune.

The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.

Men of means look at making money as a game which they love to play.

If you get up early, work late, and pay your taxes, you will get ahead -- if you strike oil.

Some people find oil. Others don't.

If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.

I buy when other people are selling.

Wealth is only a benefit of the game of money. If you win, the money will be there.

...Americans...automatically equate dissension with disloyalty. They view any criticism of our existing social, economic, and political forms, as sedition and subversion. ...(" The growing reluctance of Americans to criticize, and their increasing tendency to condemn those who, in ever dwindling numbers, will still voice dissent") is disturbing, deplorable, and truly dangerous.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.

....remember, a billion dollars isn't worth what it used to be.