22 Quotes by John Brooks

Confusion of Confusions,” written by a plunger on the Amsterdam market named Joseph de la Vega;.

He who sells what isn’t his’n must buy it back or go to prison.

It is foolish to think that you can withdraw from the Exchange after you have tasted the sweetness of the honey.

Every dog has one free bite. A dog cannot be presumed to be vicious until he has proved that he is by biting someone.

This preoccupation with the difficulty of getting a thought out of one head and into another is something the industrialists share with a substantial number of intellectuals and creative writers, more and more of whom seem inclined to regard communication, or the lack of it, as one of the greatest problems not just of industry but of humanity.

Whether the nostalgia of the Edsel boys for the Edsel runs to the humorous or to the tragic, it is a thought-provoking phenomenon. Maybe it means merely that they miss the limelight they first basked in and later squirmed in, or maybe it means that a time has come when – as in Elizabethan drama but seldom before in American business – failure can have a certain grandeur that success never knows.

Before 1900, very few new income taxes appear to have been enacted anywhere without the stimulus of a war.

The button waiting to be pushed, the whir of action, the neat reproduction dropping into the tray – all this adds up to a heady experience, and the neophyte operator of a copier feels an impulse to copy all the papers in his pockets. And once one has used a copier, one tends to be hooked.

If you’re not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?