Lee Iacocca Quotes - Page 4

You've got to say, "I think that if I keep working at this and want it badly enough I can have it." It's called perseverance.

When the product is right, you don't have to be a great marketer.

If I had to sum up in a word what makes a good manager, I'd say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act.

No matter how I'm doing financially, the Depression has never disappeared from my consciousness. To this day, I hate waste. When neckties went from narrow to wide, I kept all my old ones until the style went back to narrow.

We load up on oat bran in the morning so we'll live forever. Then we spend the rest of the day living like there's no tomorrow.

There are times in everyone's life when something constructive is born out of adversity... when things seem so bad that you've got to grab your fate by the shoulders and shake it.

I'm still not sure what is meant by good fortune and success. I know fame and power are for the birds. But then life suddenly comes into focus for me. And, ah, there stand my kids.

They're on you day and night. Their oversight is just too extreme [. . .] That's why our 10-year loan, we paid it back in three years. We couldn't stand the government. The bureaucracy kills you.

Are we going to be a services power? The double-cheeseburger-hold-the-mayo kings of the world?

We at Chrysler borrow money the old-fashioned way. We pay it back.

If a guy is over 25 percent jerk, he's in trouble. And Henry was 95 percent.

I guess I invented extended warranties, because that's all we had to sell at Chrysler in those days.

It's a good thing god doesn't let you look a year or two into the future, or you might be sorely tempted to shoot yourself.

I was fortunate to get a scholarship when I went to Lehigh University and Princeton. They were both wonderful schools. Somebody was kind enough to spend their money to educate people that they would never get to know. That's what I think philanthropy is about.

When future historians look back on our way of curing inflation...they'll probably compare it to bloodletting in the Middle Ages.

I always go back to Harry Truman: Should we drop an atomic bomb to save 100,000 lives? That's a hell of a decision to make. Did he make that decision by himself? No, he had advisers.

Why is our free-enterprise system so strong?- Not because it stands still, frozen in the past, but because it has always adapted to changing realities

I guess that's one achievement I'm really proud of. Saving Chrysler was more than jobs, more than shareholder value. Saving Chrysler was a good idea for the whole country.

Incompetency begets incompetency. The last thing a guy who isn't sure of himself wants is a guy backing him up who is sure of himself.

I forgot to shake hands and be friendly. It was an important lesson about leadership.

Styling cars sells cars and safety does not.

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.

My father used to say, 'You can spend a lot of time making money. The tough time comes when you have to give it away properly.' How to give something back, that's the tough part in life.

A guy named Charlie Beacham was my first mentor at Ford. He taught me the importance of the dealers, and he rubbed my nose in the retail business.

Every business and every product has risks. You can't get around it.