This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss.
Events |
Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
People |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
In most discussions of the social responsibility of business it is assumed that making a profit is fundamentally incompatible with social responsibility or is at least irrelevant to it.
Business | Responsibility | Business |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
The first responsibility of business is to make enough profit to cover the costs for the future. If this social responsibility is not met, no other social responsibility can be met.
Business | Enough | Responsibility | Business |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
The masses have never believed in sophisms taught by economists, uttered more to confirm exploiters in their rights than to convert exploited! Peasants and workers, crushed by misery and finding no support in the well-to-do classes, have let things go, save from time to time when they have affirmed their rights by insurrection. And if workers ever thought that the day would come when personal appropriation of capital would profit all by turning it into a stock of wealth to be shared by all, this illusion is vanishing like so many others. The worker perceives that he has been disinherited, and that disinherited he will remain, unless he has recourse to strikes or revolts to tear from his masters the smallest part of riches built up by his own efforts; that is to say, in order to get that little, he already must impose on himself the pangs of hunger and face imprisonment, if not exposure to Imperial, Royal, or Republican fusillades.
Day | Hunger | Illusion | Order | Riches | Rights | Thought | Time | Wealth | Will | Riches | Thought |
There has been opposition to experimenting on animals for a long time. This opposition has made little headway because experimenters, backed by commercial firms that profit by supplying laboratory animals and equipment, have been able to convince legislators and the public that opposition comes from uninformed fanatics who consider the interests of animals more important than the interests of human beings.
Important | Little | Opposition | Public |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
The very essence of the present economic system is, that the worker can never enjoy the well-being he has produced, and that the number of those who live at his expense will always augment. The more a country is advanced in industry, the more this number grows. Inevitably, industry is directed, and will have to be directed, not towards what is needed to satisfy the needs of all, but towards that which, at a given moment, brings in the greatest temporary profit to a few. Of necessity, the abundance of some will be based on the poverty of others, and the straitened circumstances of the greater number will have to be maintained at all costs, that there may be hands to sell themselves for a part only of that which they are capable of producing; without which, private accumulation of capital is impossible!
Abundance | Circumstances | Industry | Poverty | Present | System | Will |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.
Belief | Capitalism | Creed | Equality | Freedom | Individual | Order | Progress | Society | Society |
It may be thought justifiable to require tests on animals of potentially life-saving drugs, but the same kinds of tests are used for products like cosmetics, food coloring, and floor polishes. Should thousands of animals suffer so that a new kind of lipstick or floor wax can be put on the market? Don't we already have an excess of most of these products? Who benefits from their introduction, except the companies that hope to profit from them?
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
Do not boast of your good deeds. Do not reproach others, making them firm in their faults. Do not spare yourself in the work which you must accomplish. Do not take advantage of a person's ignorance. Harm no one for your own benefit. Make no false claims. Render your services faithfully to all who require them. Seek not profit by putting someone in straits. Speak not against others in their absence.
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.
Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL
For, by your research, your unveiling of the secrets of nature, and your teaching of men to direct the forces of nature toward their own welfare, you preach at the same time, in the language of figures, formulae and discoveries, the inexpressible harmony of the work of an all-wise God. In fact, according to the measure of its progress, and contrary to affirmations advanced in the past, true science discovers God in an ever-increasing degree-as though God were waiting behind every door opened by science. We would even say that from this progressive discovery of God, which is realized in the increase of knowledge, there flow benefits not only for the scientist himself when he reflects as a philosopher-and how can he escape such reflection?-but also for those who share in these new discoveries or make them the object of their own considerations. Genuine philosophers profit from these discoveries in a very special way, because when they take these scientific conquests as the basis for their rational speculations, their conclusions thereby acquire greater certainty, while they are provided with clearer illustrations in the midst of possible shadows and more convincing assistance in establishing an ever more satisfying response to difficulties and objections.
Discovery | God | Harmony | Language | Men | Nature | Object | Science | Waiting | Work | Discovery | God |
Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL
In recommending St. Thomas to Our subjects as supreme guide in the Scholastic philosophy, it goes without saying that Our intention was to be understood as referring above all to those principles upon which that philosophy is based as its foundation… St. Thomas perfected and augmented still further by the almost angelic quality of his intellect all this superb patrimony of wisdom which he inherited from his predecessors and applied it to prepare, illustrate and protect sacred doctrine in the minds of men… He (Thomas Aquinas) enlightened the Church more than all the other Doctors together; a man can derive more profit from his books in one year than from a lifetime spent in pondering the philosophy of others.
Books | Church | Doctrine | Intention | Man | Philosophy | Principles | Sacred | Wisdom | Intellect |
In recent years, long-established expectations about doing business have given way under the pressures of the modern economy. Too many companies are driven more by the need to ensure that investors get good quarterly returns. Too often, this means that they view most employees as costs, not investments, and that they expend less concern on job training, employee profit sharing, family-friendly policies, shared decision-making, or even fair pay raises. Even workers' jobs may be sacrificed as executive seek short-term profits by moving production to countries where wages are lower and environmental and other regulations less stringent. Instead of We're all in this together, the message from the top is frequently, you're on your own. The growing inequality of incomes has serious implications for children. America's turbo-charged economy has produced cheaper and better goods and greater efficiency, but it also has created serious social dislocations that undermine family and community values.
Better | Business | Family | Good | Inequality | Means | Need | Business |
Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.
Beauty | Duty | Influence | Joy | Opportunity | Regard | Spirit | Study | Work | Beauty | Learn |
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
Richard Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough
The art of being agreeable frequently miscarries through the ambition which accompanies it. Wit, learning, wisdom,--what can more effectually conduce to the profit and delight of society? Yet I am sensible that a man may be too invariably wise, learned, or witty to be agreeable; and I take the reason of this to be, that pleasure cannot be bestowed by the simple and unmixed exertion of any one faculty or accomplishment.