30 Quotes by Berry Gordy

I didn't want to be a big record mogul and all that stuff. I just wanted to write songs and make people laugh.

Michael Jackson was not an artist who comes along once in a decade, a generation, or a lifetime. He was an artist who comes along only once, period… He raised the bar and then BROKE the bar!

But once I saw them [Jackson 5 during audition], I rushed out with my video camera to start taping them because I knew that they were something so special, mainly because of the lead singer, nine-year-old Michael Jackson. And it was just so obvious to me that he was a star.

It's like losing a son because I loved Michael and Michael loved me. But you know, as when people grow up and they make their own decisions and they move forward, there's a distance, and I think that Michael in some cases might have gone too far with some of the things he was doing.

His [Michael Jackson] behavior was weird, but when you get an artist and a genius, many of the geniuses throughout our whole history were weird. And they did weird things because none of us could understand what was on their mind and why they did what they did.

All artists have runners, people that tell them what to do, business managers, lawyers, these - if they get the right ones, they're lucky, and if they get the wrong ones, they're unlucky.

There aren’t enough people who care about the future. They are too busy worrying about today and what they can grab now

Money had never been the main thing for me. It's the legacy that was important.

Every day I watched how a bare metal frame, rolling down the line would come off the other end, a spanking brand new car. What a great idea! Maybe, I could do the same thing with my music. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door, an unknown, go through a process, and come out another door, a star.