James Cash Penney

Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.

The best teamwork comes from men who are working independently toward one goal in unison.

It is the service we are not obliged to give that people value most.

It is always the start that requires the greatest effort.

No serious-minded man should have time for the mediocre in any phase of his living.

I cannot remember a time when the Golden Rule was not my motto and precept, the torch that guided my footsteps.

The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.

Did I have a problem with lying to get the job? None whatsoever.

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

I never insisted that I was a good student.

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

I have a great, great company. I employ thousands of people. And I’m very proud of the job I did.

Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence.

I do not believe in excuses. I believe in hard work as the prime solvent of life’s problems.

I suspect that many corporations have begun to understand that they have an important role to play in the lives of their communities, and that allocating funds to support local groups helps them discharge that function and also burnish their image.

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.

The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning; to create a product or service to make the world a better place.

If you change anything about the way you approach selling, the thing that would make the biggest difference would be your attitude, your attitude toward your customer, your service, the benefits of your products, your employer, and yourself.

Too many would-be executives are slaves of routine.

If I had asked them what they had wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

[On his first job in the mailroom of William Morris a casting agency] It was the first time in the my life that I thought ‘I can do that.’