David Geffen

Things that seemed simple and superfluous had some meaning, maybe it wasn’t a great meaning, it didn’t shake the world…

I must have had a dozen jobs and I got fired from all of them.

It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.

It’s very easy for me to thank everyone for the incredible contribution they’ve made to my life.

You can’t do this! We have an arrangement! We have a contract!

[In 1969] I thought how awful, this poor girl is being managed by someone who had no respect for her at all… I’ve been her agent since then.

I don’t hire a lot of number-crunchers, and I don’t trust fancy marketing surveys. I do my own surveys and draw my own conclusions.

Our modern industrialism, changed to motives of public service, will provide means to remove every injustice that gives soil for prejudice.

The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up.

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

A merchant who approaches business with the idea of serving the public well has nothing to fear from the competition.

It took only 10 minutes to do Chelsea deal with Roman Abramovich but I had to Google him first … I wasn’t sure if Jeremy Beadle was going to jump out.

I never aspired to be a public figure. I have always been interested primarily in real business and the development of business strategies.

We have had just one main purpose during these years, and that is to give the people transportation of the most dependable quality at the lowest possible cost. Our car was called the Universal Car thirty years ago, because it fulfilled so many needs; it is The Universal Car today for the same reason.

For a long time now, I have believed that industry and agriculture are natural partners and that they should begin to recognize and practice their partnership. Each of them is suffering from ailments which the other can cure. Agriculture needs a wider andsteadier market; industrial workers need more steadier jobs. Can each be made to supply what the other needs? I think so. The link between is Chemistry. In the vicinity of Dearborn we are farming twenty thousand acres for everything from sunflowers to soy beans. We pass the crops through our laboratory to learn how they may be used in the manufacture of motor cars and, thus provide an industrial market for the farmers’ products.

When you are in real estate, you are going to make some mistakes.

I did not feel ‘evil’ when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years.

The problem with the bronco is to get on and stay on. This is the problem with the Golden Rule-to understand and apply.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.