The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.

I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart.

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

After a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-mart's phenomenal success has been that very tendency.

"Somehow over the years people have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was...just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. But...it was an outgrowth of everything we'd been doing since [1945]...And like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making."

Most everything I've done I've copied from somebody else.

If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them - not that they are working for you.