Richard Branson

You don’t learn to walk by following rules, you learn by doing and by falling over.

The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records.

If you’re bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don’t think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really.

It’s all too easy to miss out on the important moments in life because you’re too busy staring at your phone.

Listen more than you talk. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world.

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

Only one thing makes prosperity, and that is work.

Your business, and your brand must first let people know what you care about and that you care about them.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

An imitation may be quite successful in its own way, but imitation can never be Success. Success is a first-hand creation.

See what a 25-cent raise will do to us, said Mr. Ford. So they figured the daily and monthly cost of a 25-cent increase. Put on another quarter and see what that will cost, he said. And so they went on, 25 cents a step. Finally the wage of $2.34 stood at $4.75–more than 100 percent increase. One of the associates–a good financial head–remarked rather sarcastically that if they were going to be fools, why not be first-class fools and make it $5. All right, said Mr. Ford, let’s make it $5.

Acquiring the habit of note-taking is therefore a wonderfully complementary skill to that of listening.

It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.

If you think your boss is stupid, remember: you wouldn’t have a job if he was any smarter.

Burdening people with debt is an old deal not a new deal.

The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything.

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.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Two classes of people lose money; those who are too weak to guard what they have; those who win money by trick. They both lose in the end.