| "And old Dave, he'd go up to his room, y'understand, put on his green velvet slippers - I'll never forget - and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want." Arthur Miller (1915 - 2005), Death of a Salesman, 1949. |
| "Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops." Thomas J. Watson Jr |
| "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all." Helen Keller |
| "Everyone is in business for himself, for he is selling his services, labor or ideas. Until one realizes that this is true he will not take conscious charge of his life and will always be looking outside himself for guidance." Sidney Madwed |
| "You've got to be success minded. You've got to feel that things are coming your way when you're out selling; otherwise, you won't be able to sell anything." Curtis Carlson |
| "It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive." Nicholas Johnson |
| "Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." Frank Zappa |
| "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment brings intuitive knowledge." Jalal Uddin Rumi, Persian mystic and poet, 1207 - 1273. |
| "Advertising is, actually, a simple phenomenon in terms of economics. It is merely a substitute for a personal sales force - an extension, if you will, of the merchant who cries aloud his wares." Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising, 1986. |
| "Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity." Karl Marx |
| "Of course you sell candidates for political office the same way you sell soap or sealing wax or whatever; because, when you get right down to it, that's the only way anything is sold." Sid Bernstein |
| "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." P. J. O'Rourke, American Journalist, (1947-). |
| "Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise . . . not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message." William Bernbach |
| "The successful people are the ones who can think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at." Don Marquis |
| "Most people think "selling" is the same as "talking". But the most effective salespeople know that listening is the most important part of their job." Roy Bartell |
| "All progress is based upon a universal innate desire of every organism to live beyond its income." Samuel Butler |
| "There is no such thing as a self-made man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the makeup of our character and our thoughts, as well as our success." George Matthew Adams |
| "On any given Monday I am one sale closer and one idea away from being a Millionaire." Larry D. Turner |
| "Quality isn't something that can be argued into an article or promised into it. It must be put there. If it isn't put there, the finest sales talk in the world won't act as a substitute." C.G. Campbell |
| "The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever's wrong in the merchant's business. If the truth isn't tellable, fix it so it is. That is about all there is to it." John E. Powers, 19th Century copywriter. |
| "I have learned that trying to guess what the boss or the client wants is the most debilitating of all influences in the creation of good advertising." Leo Burnett |
| "As you travel down life's highway...whatever be your goal, you cannot sell a doughnut without acknowledging the hole." Harold J. Shayler |
| "The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product." John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1980. |
| "Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust." Zig Ziglar |
| "Money is good for bribing yourself through the inconveniences of life." Gottfried Reinhardt |
| "Every memorable act in the history of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it because it gives any challenge or any occupation, no matter how frightening or difficult, a new meaning. Without enthusiasm you are doomed to a life of mediocrity but with it you can accomplish miracles." Og Mandino |
| "Success is the culmination of failures, mistakes, false starts, confusion, and the determination to keep going anyway." Nick Gleason, Founder and CEO, CitySoft |
| "Business is like riding a bicycle. Either you keep moving or you fall down." Frank Lloyd Wright |
| "The most unprofitable item ever manufactured is an excuse." John Mason, Conquering An Enemy Called Average, 1996. |
| "Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private. Commercial society finds unintelligible the idea that anything - an emotion, activity, or product - is too 'intimately personal' for uninhibited commercial treatment." George Will, 1975 |
