Quotes About Profit

We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return. Clearly, there's some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What's missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it's quite astonishing.

Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?

Which is supposed to mean they're doing something in their broadcasting they would not do is they were simply out to maximize profit; if they were really public service institutions, not purely profit maximizing institutions.

Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.

There is no worse material poverty than one that does not allow for earning one’s bread and deprives one of the dignity of work. Youth unemployment, informality, and the lack of labor rights are not inevitable; they are the result of a previous social option, of an economic system that puts profit above man; if the profit is economic, to put it above humanity or above man, is the effect of a disposable culture that considers the human being in himself as a consumer good, which can be used and then discarded.

Malicious acts are performed by people for personal gain … Sorcerers, though, have an ulterior purpose for their acts, which has nothing to do with personal gain. The fact that they enjoy their acts does not count as gain. Rather, it is a condition of their character. The average man acts only if there is a chance for profit. Warriors say they act not for profit but for the spirit.

Non-profit organizations think like non-profit organizations. That's the problem.

One of the proven ways of getting workers more involved with their jobs is by dovetailing employee profit-sharing and stock ownership plans with greater responsibility sharing... Trade unions in this country should... consider these arrangements much more carefully than they have up to now... Expanded employee profit participation and stock ownership would provide workers with a greater measure of economic and social independence, thus stimulating increased productivity.

Perhaps my number one rule is: Don't try to make a profit on a bad trade, just try to find the best place to get out.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery. The whole future of America's black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.

You must find something you want to live for that's bigger than yourself - a mission - whether it's your children, a business, a non-profit, whatever. That pulls you to achieve, which is far more sustainable than to push yourself to. You can only push yourself for so long.

Jesus has many lovers of His kingdom of heaven, but he has few bearers of His Cross. Many desire His consolation, but few desire His tribulation. He finds many comrades in eating and drinking, but He finds few hands who will be with Him in His abstinence and fastingBut those who love Jesus purely for Himself, and not for their own profit or convenience, bless Him as heartily in temptation and tribulation and in all other adversities as they do in time of consolation. And if He never sent them consolation, they would still bless and praise Him.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Happiness is not an individual matter. When you are able to bring relief, or bring back the smile to one person, not only that person profits, but you also profit.

Many receive advice, few profit by it.

There is no blindness more insidious, more fatal that this race for profit.

The workers should take over the factories, and shut down Boeing's profit-making machine.

There are all sorts of institutions in the economic world which depart from the simple price/market model which I worked on in an earlier incarnation and which has been sort of the mainstream of economic theories since Adam Smith and David Ricardo. There are all sorts of contractual relations between firms and individuals which do not conform to the simple price theory - profit-sharing schemes and so forth - and the explanation for these suddenly became clear. We now understand why these emerged and that they are based on differences in information in the economy.

University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society.

It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That’s why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody’s mind is to make a profit from it. It’s so beyond me. I just can’t imagine being that detached from humanity. I can’t imagine being that thoughtless and careless and so empty inside.

I remember talking to, 40 years ago, one of the leading people in the government who was involved in arms control, pressing for arms control measures, détente, and so on. He's very high up, and we were talking about whether arms control could succeed. And only partially as a joke he said, "Well it might succeed if the high tech industry makes more profit from arms control than it can make from weapons-related research and production. If we get to that tipping point maybe arms control will work." He was partially joking but there's a truth that lies behind it.

Nothing is more difficult than to make a profit.

Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.

Men and women are sacrificed to the idols of profit and consumption: it is the 'culture of waste.' If a computer breaks it is a tragedy, but poverty, the needs and dramas of so many people end up being considered normal. ... When the stock market drops 10 points in some cities, it constitutes a tragedy. Someone who dies is not news, but lowering income by 10 points is a tragedy! In this way people are thrown aside as if they were trash.

The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.

... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

Personally I do not believe in the likelihood of Persian oil deposits being worked at profit.

Remember the people you address are selfish, as we all are. They care nothing about your interests or profit. They seek service for themselves

Shareholders have the right and obligation to set the parameters of corporate behavior within which management pursues profit.

The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.

Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It is irritating to be woken up. That's the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up. I hope I'm going to be wise here and make no attempt whatsoever to wake you up if you are asleep. It is really none of my business, even though I say to you at times, "Wake up!" My business is to do my thing, to dance my dance. If you profit from it fine; if you don't, too bad! As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens."

No one ever went broke by taking a profit.

I left Xerox for the non-profit sector because it was clear to me that only public/private partnerships can pull off a turnaround plan at the scale we need to tackle global poverty.

In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.

Profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.

The obsession with economic profit and technical efficiency puts the human rhythms of life at risk.

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

A tremendous amount of the entrepreneurial initiative, if you want to call it that, comes from the dynamic state sector on which most of the economy relies to socialize costs and risks and privatize eventual profit. And that's achieved by, if you like, advertising.

Profit isn't and shouldn't be the mission of business. The mission of business is to help people. To help your customers, your co-workers, your employees, and your partners. Success is not a number - it's not X dollars or Y customers - it's a measurement of VALUE.

The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on your successes-any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your mistakes.

We have to choose between a global market driven only by calculations of short-term profit, and one which has a human face.

Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.

A business society, therefore, always has in its children a large group of individuals who cannot make money and who do not understand (or want to understand) the profit motive. In short, they are subversives.

Apparently there is no profit in the unique, or not enough to make it worthwhile to preserve. Ultimately it drains the life out of us, and existentialism starts to make more and more sense.

All told, these profit levels have put the world's five largest publicly traded oil companies on track to earn more than $100 billion before year's end. Yet, at the same time that Big Oil's bottom line is going up, so are Americans' energy costs.

Here's the problem: Profiteers haunt America, and for everything we try to control, someone's going to profit from it, more than you control it.