It was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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.

The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say. It's terribly important for everyone to get involved. Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.

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.

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

I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.

I had confidence that as long as we did our work well and were good to our customers, there would be no limit to us.