A successful business maximizes the present value of future earnings. The first requirement, therefore, of business success is sustainable profits. One-time winnings, in business as in casinos, are disappointing. We expect more from our investments than that.

If you really want something, you've got to keep going after it.

Micromessaging -- communicating with other human beings through visual, audible, sublingual means, no doubt predates our ability to speak. We actually read micromessages quite naturally without thinking about them. You might say human beings read each other's micromessages subconsciously, in the same way that one dog understands another dog is unfriendly simply because the dog's fur is standing on end. The dogs read each other perfectly. It's not all that different for people.

Ideals and morality are often spoken of as virtual antimatter to the behaviors allegedly needed to maximize profits.

Gun violence is not something that appears just in a bad neighborhood or in another part of the world. It appears right here, right outside your door.

Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.

Capitalism is of this material world; it provides us with the means to live; it empowers us within the known world of sense and human reason. If it is to be measured by a strict standard of holiness, by religious normativity alone, then there can never be a moral capitalism.