J. Paul Getty Quotes Page 3

“Some people find oil. Others don't.”

“The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavour. The beauty endures. A work of art lives through the generations and centuries.
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“The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.”

“The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him – and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.”

“The key to wealth is to learn how to make money while you sleep.”

“The man who comes up with a means for doing or producing anything better, faster or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips.”

“The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.”

“The number one guideline to success is you must be in business for yourself. When you work for someone else, you sell your time at wholesale to your employer, who then re-sells it at retail to the customer.”

“The overwhelming majority of my rated wealth consists of investments in companies that produce goods and services.”

“The rich are not born sceptical or cynical. They are made that way by events, circumstances.”

“The Roaring Twenties were the period of that Great American Prosperity which was built on shaky foundations.”

“There are always opportunities through which businessmen can profit handsomely if they will only recognize and seize them.”

“There are at least 50 cities in the world that would have liked to obtain the Getty Collection.”

“There are heads of royal families who control hereditary fortunes that defy comprehension.”

“There are no safeguards that can protect the emotional investor from himself.”

“There are one hundred men seeking security to one able man who is willing to risk his fortune.”

“There is obviously something wrong with our educational system. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there might even be something wrong with at least some of our schoolteachers. But heaven help anyone daring to express such heretical views.”

“There is only one way to make a great deal of money; and that is in a business of your own.”

“There may be some substitute for hard facts, but if there is, I have no idea what it can be.”

“To become a billionaire, you need luck, knowledge, a great capacity to work and the main thing – the mentality of a billionaire.”

“To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business.”

“Today's dissenters mainly focus their attention and expend their energies on the most inconsequential of trivia. Allegedly serious intellectuals quibble endlessly over such ridiculous trivialities. In the meantime, the public is lulled into a perilous somnolence, spoon-fed pap, and palpable untruths, many of which are turned out by special-interest and pressure groups and well organized propaganda machines.”

“Wealth is only a benefit of the game of money. If you win, the money will be there.”

“What I learned at Oxford has been used to great advantage throughout my business career.”

“Whether we like it or not, men and women are not the same in nature, temperament, emotions and emotional responses.”

“Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.”

“You cannot bring about prosperity without discouraging thrift.”

“You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.”

“You must not only learn to live with tension, you must seek it out. You must learn to thrive on stress.”

“You must take risks, both with your own money or with borrowed money. Risk taking is essential to business growth.”