British Businessman Quotes

Richard Branson

Cecil Rhodes

Joseph Chamberlain

Walter Bagehot

George Goschen, 1st Viscount Goschen

Denis Thatcher

Joseph Prestwich

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

Richard Branson

Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today's richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.

Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.

No man ought to be compelled to live where a rose cannot grow.

Oh, he's football crazy, he's football mad
And the football it has robbed him o' the wee bit sense he had.
And it would take a dozen skivvies, his clothes to wash and scrub,
Since our Jock became a member of that terrible football club.

I believe that the mindset that allows you to spend your working life thanking and congratulating people rather than being unpleasant to them is the mainstay of good leadership.

Once you're head of a public company you are expected to perform; you're like an unpaid greyhound on a racetrack called the stock market. They'd take bets on us, but not add anything at all.

I have the courage of my opinions, but I have not the temerity to give a political blank cheque to Lord Salisbury.

George Goschen, 1st Viscount Goschen

Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.

Charles Saatchi

In rich economies, stability matters a lot; small further increases in allocative efficiency matter less. Thus, policy should be heavily focused on ensuring macroeconomic and financial stability and very wary of financial innovation if it carries with it any risk of increased instability.

Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell

We even sell a pair of earrings for under £1, which is cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks & Spencers. But I have to say the earrings probably won't last as long.

Industry shares a need common to every social enterprise from church to guild, municipality to empire, war to university.

The key to success is to risk thinking unconventional thoughts. Convention is the enemy of progress. As long as you've got slightly more perception that the average wrapped loaf, you could invent something.

The first rule of luck in business is that you should persevere in doing the right thing. Opportunities will come your way if you do.

There's no one who wants this [Deepwater Horizon oil spill] over more than I do. I'd like my life back.

The House of Commons is the greatest closed shop of all…For the purposes of government, a country of 55 million people is forced to depend on a talent pool which could not sustain a single multinational company.

If Florence Nightingale were carrying her lamp through the corridors of the NHS today she would almost certainly be searching for the people in charge.

Budget thy expenses that thou mayest have coins to pay for thy necessities, to pay for thy enjoyments, and to gratify thy worthwhile desires without spending more than nine-tenths of thy earnings.

George Samuel Clason

At last, by singing and repeating enthusiastic amorous hymns, and ignorantly applying particular texts of scripture, I got my imagination to the proper pitch, and thus was I born again in an instant.

James Lackington

Margaret Thatcher: This food is absolutely delicious.
Denis Thatcher: So it should be. They're charging like the Light Brigade.

Eating in Harry's Bar

The Ramblers are just a bunch of the dirty mac brigade. The great unwashed. Would you have a lot of Herberts in your garden?

Nicholas van Hoogstraten

If there is such a person on the planet, then he or she-this self-appointed arbiter of appropriateness -deserves to be confronted with as many inappropriate transgressions as possible.

I would just like to challenge the idea that it is necessary to have a lot of women, or a particular number, on a board. Business is very, very competitive and you should take the performance of women in another competitive area, which is sport where [men] have no strength advantage. Chess, bridge, poker - women come absolutely nowhere. I think that just has to be borne in mind.

The geologist commences where the astronomer ends.

Joseph Prestwich

Equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambesi.