James Cash Penney

As a rule, we find what we look for; we achieve what we get ready for.

There has never been a time when a career in the Penney Company was not a challenge that brought out the best in a man.

My definition of an executive’s job is brief and to the point. It is simply this: Getting things done through other people.

Men are not great or small because of their material possessions. They are great or small because of what they are.

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

Change is vital, improvement the logical form of change.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.

All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.

Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father, will be the most daring in deceiving others.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.