Lee Iacocca Quotes

I'd really love to meet the guy I'm supposed to be. I'd hire him in a second.

Greenmail, in case you're wondering, is when a company pays a raider a premium for his holdings-if he'll go away. What I think it really is is blackmail in a pin-striped suit.

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

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.

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

What is it that you like doing? If you don't like it, get out of it, because you'll be lousy at it. You don't have to stay with a job for the rest of your life, because if you don't like it you'll never be successful in it.

If you want to make good use of your time, you've got to know what's most important and then give it all you've got.

If we screw it up, start over. Try something else.

Mistakes are a part of life; you can't avoid them. All you can hope is that they won't be too expensive and that you don't make the same mistake twice.

No matter what you've done for yourself or for humanity, if you can't look back on having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really accomplished?

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

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

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.

The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.

There's a world of difference between a strong ego, which is essential, and a large ego-which can be destructive.

Every little kid wants to grow up to be a cowboy, and I did.

I don't need a $100 million mistake. Try to make a $5 million mistake if you have to make one.

In business, you're trying to make a buck. God was good to me and blessed me. I made some money and started this foundation years ago, and it has grown in size. With the foundation it's a lot different, because the bottom line isn't how you can make more money or get a better return, it's helping the projects that you feel strongly about move forward.

The right decision is the wrong decision if it's made too late.

The cement in our whole democracy today is the worker who makes $ 15 an hour. He's the guy who will buy a house and a car and a refrigerator. He's the oil in the engine.

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.

Over the years, many executives have said to me with pride: 'Boy, I worked so hard last year that I didn't take any vacation.' I always feel like responding, "You dummy. You mean to tell me you can take responsibility for an eighty-million-dollar project and you can't plan two weeks out of the year to have some fun?

The primary skill of a manager consists of knowing how to make assignments and picking the right people to carry out those assignments

Thanks to properly selecting the clients you will not be unnecessarily wasting time.

It was emotional when Chrysler sold out to the Germans.

I'm sometimes described as a flamboyant leader and a hip-shooter, a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants operator. But if that were true, I could never have been successful in this business.

I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way.

In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.

The great issues facing us today are not Republican issues or Democratic issues. The political parties can debate the means, but both parties must embrace the end objective, which is to make America great again.

There is no substitute for accurate knowledge. Know yourself, know your business, know your men.

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.

There are times when even the best manager is like the little boy with the big dog, waiting to see where the dog wants to go so he can take him there.

You can't have a country or a city or a state that's worth a damn unluss you govern within yourself in your day-to-day life.

Any supervisor worth his salt would rather deal with people who attempt too much than with those who try too little.

People want economy, and they'll pay any price to get it.

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.

If you own up to your mistakes, you don't suffer as much. But that's a tough lesson to learn.

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.

The ability to concentrate and to use your time well is everything if you want to succeed in business--or almost anywhere else for that matter.

Even a correct decision is wrong when it was taken too late.

In the old days, if a neighbors apples fell into your yard, you worked it out over the back fence or picked them up and made pies. Today, you sue.

I have always found that if I move with seventy-five percent or more of the facts that I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.

Listening can make the difference between a mediocre organization and a great one.

To solve big problems you have to be willing to do unpopular things.

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.

One of the things the government can't do is run anything. The only things our government runs are the post office and the railroads, and both of them are bankrupt.

I only wish I could find an institute that teaches people how to listen. Business people need to listen at least as much as they need to talk. Too many people fail to realize that real communication goes in both directions.

In a corporation, there can only be one guy in the end: the CEO.