Top 500 Business Quotes

How important is failure - yes, failure - to the health of a thriving, innovative business? So important that Ratan Tata, chairman of India's largest corporation, gives an annual award to the employee who comes up with the best idea that failed.

Entrepreneurship is seen as if you're in Silicon Valley or New York City and starting an app business or a social-media business, which is cool. But what we really have to focus on is people who make things, and how can we fund them, and how can we encourage people to stay in their community and make a difference in their community.

I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people.

The reality of our business is that for every actor who's rolled up his tent and given up and gone home, the next day you hear about some shoe salesman at Macy's who had this audition and now he's Harrison Ford. There's always that carrot out there in our business.

We are fortunate to have collectively built a culture that matters, a brand that matters, a business that matters. It is impossible to state in words how much this team means to me, how much Hulu means to me.

You can't do business with a man who doesn't know the meaning of a contract. You can't do business with a firm who swears they'll do one thing one day and does just the opposite the next. You can't do business with a company who takes your goods on a cash basis and then pays you off in bum harmonicas.