Best 190 quotes of Malcolm Forbes on MyQuotes

A big cigar in a young face requires the best of both.

A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours.

Accepting blame when it's not really due sometimes makes the point better.

After 40, one's face begins to tell more than one's tongue.

After the fact, our hearts always go out to the fallen Goliaths. Yet we invariably root for their Davids. Until they're winners.

Age isn't important until you run out of it.

A gun in the hand is worth any number being tested.

A hug's a happy thing while a shrug's so often destructive.

A little reciprocity goes a long way.

A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective.

All too often we say of a man doing a good job that he is indispensable. A flattering canard, as so many disillusioned and retired and fired have discovered when the world seems to keep on turning without them. In business, a man can come nearest to indispensability by being dispensable in his current job. How can a man move up to new responsibilities if he is the only one able to handle his present tasks? It matters not how small or large the job you now have, if you have trained no one to do it as well, you're not available; you've made your promotion difficult if not impossible.

All work and no play makes jack. With enough jack, Jack needn't be a dull boy.

A lot of money doesn't make anyone more often right. It just makes him harder to correct.

An inadequate chief executive officer's time at the top is always too long no matter how short.

Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.

Are you not justified in feeling inferior, when you seek to cover it up with arrogance and insolence?

As you get older, don't slow down. Speed up. There's less time left!

As you get older there shouldn't be anything you won't try. The payoff is that you open up whole new avenues that are fun. It's a misinterpretation of life to live it only in preparation for the next one. To subordinate the one you've got to an indefinite next round is foolish. It's a waste of this life not to live this life. What's next is anybody's guess.

A Tax Loophole: A deduction that the other guy gets.

Authority's for sharing only when the sharer is sure of his (or hers).

At the heart of any good business is a chief executive officer with one.

A winner must first know what losing's like.

At today's prices for medicines, doctors and hospitals-if the latter are available at any price-only millionaires can afford to be hurt or sick and pay for it. Very few people want socialized medicine in the U.S. But pressure for it is going to appear with the same hurricane force as the demand for pollution control if the medicine men and hospital operators don't take soon some Draconian measures... At the present rate of doctor fees and hospital costs under Medicare and Medicaid plans [taxpayers] are shovelling in billions with nothing but escalation in sight.

Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.

Blaming destiny is a poor out for those who don't reach desired destinations.

By the time we've made it, we've had it.

Can you understand why the Congress, most states and most cities refuse to pass legislation requiring the registration and licensing of any and all guns? For the life of me, I can't. We must register our cars and be licensed to drive. In many places we must get licenses for dogs and even bicycles. Being required to register firearms and show the competence and capacity to handle them hardly seems unreasonable, hardly seems an infringement of freedom. What is it that blocks such legislation? Why do they block it? How are they able to block it?

Clout is something some seem to have-until they try exercising it.

Compliment others on the virtues they have; and they're not half as pleased as being complimented for the ones they don't have.

Crime in the city streets is more than a political issue. It's a too rampant fact.... In Indianapolis they have come up with a most sensible, affordable approach to the problem. Policemen are assigned their police patrol cars for personal use after hours. They are encouraged to use the police car while taking the family shopping, to the movies, and everywhere one takes one's family. As a result, says the Police Chief's assistant, we may have as many as 400 cars on the street instead of 100 or so per shift. [And] the presence of the police car obviously indicates the proximity of policemen.

Daydreams are doable. The turn-on is not in scale, spectacle, or cost. It's in the doing. Anything you haven't done is an adventure. Wanting to is the principal requirement. If you can do and want to, don't not. In short, while alive, live.

Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.

Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.

Economists' unanimity that bad business is ahead is the most reassuring news possible. It's very unlikely that this will be the one time they're right.

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

Enlightening editorial writers is even more difficult than educating educators.

Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Food may be essential as fuel for the body, but good food is fuel for the soul.

For corporations to be bedfellows with the arts is good business for both. The architecture that houses a company is a more visible statement than the president's in the annual report. Ditto interiors, particularly of offices and sometimes, dramatically, in plants. For solvent businesses, support of community cultural undertakings in music, drama, dance creates great goodwill. Also, the existence of such activities is often important to the executives and their families that companies want to keep or attract to keep.

For some of us it seems like yesterday when Ike was in the White House, the U.S. Senate censured Joe McCarthy, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public school was unconstitutional.

Generous gestures yield the most when that isn't their purpose.

Give naught, get same. Give much, get same.

Hoarding one's hurts hurts only the hoarder.

Hopeless cases: Executives who assert themselves by saying No when they should say Yes.

How in heck are they handling their surplus population in Hell these days? Maybe by the time you and I are in the queue there won't be room for us.

How to fail: Try too hard.

How to succeed? Try hard enough.

I don't think anybody can be a success who doesn't like what they do. [But it's] no job if it has no challenge; there's nothing to it if there are no problems. The essential thing is liking what you're doing.