Conrad Hilton Quotes
120 Conrad Hilton Quotes
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[On looking at the Waldorf on Park Avenue] I suddenly realized that I was seeing a dream, a wild, all but impossible dream, fulfilled – and that can’t help but fill a man with awe.
Conrad Hilton
No matter how late we worked into the night, I started the day on my knees.
Conrad Hilton
I was giving thanks, not for the Waldorf, but for the All-American right to dream with the actual possibility of seeing that dream come true.
Conrad Hilton
I… had looked up from the bottom of the heap with thirty eight cents in my pocket and seen only a mountain of debt. But even then I had the complete confidence that our way of life offered me the freedom to crawl back up and eventually push out my horizons as far as my vision and strength would carry me.
Conrad Hilton
[On dreaming] Imaginative thinking backed by enthusiasm, vitality, expectation, to which all men may aspire.
Conrad Hilton
[On dreams] It has to be backed by work and faith, or it has no hands or feet.
Conrad Hilton
[On the recently vacated New Mexico State Bank of San Antonio] This had been my first ‘big’ dream and I worked harder making it a reality, suffered more heartbreak, struggled against bigger odds over this infinitesimal building in the middle of nowhere than at any other time in my career, barring the Depression. And that, of course, is another story…
Conrad Hilton
I wondered who had had the biggest – and bravest – dream. Connie, daring to dream a bank into existence in this desolation and parlaying the dream into a chain of hotels, or Gus [His father], who ha had the audacity to envision building a life raising a family, making his fortune, in this isolate spot?
Conrad Hilton
Bargaining was – and is – a very personal thing with a great deal of tradition behind it. You have to know the rules. But if you do, and have a zest for it, a good bargaining bout between well-matched opponents can be as exciting as a major league ball game.
Conrad Hilton
I personally have been able to do business with some pretty rough characters; but I have never been able to deal with a liar… It isn’t worth the effort. You can’t win.
Conrad Hilton
We moved to Long Beach because we were rich. In less than two years [On the panic of 1907] we weren’t rich any more. But we made the most of it while it lasted.
Conrad Hilton
Father never went bust. He bent, as I was to bend later, but he never went broke. Money simply didn’t exist in the fall of ’07. He lost a lot. He owed a lot. He could sell nothing or, if he did, he was forced to extend credit he couldn’t afford. We were certainly in a fix… It was time to go back to work… That’s when we went into the hotel business. My first hotel.
Conrad Hilton
For me… the ability to formulate quickly, to resolve any problem into its simplest, clearest form, has been exceedingly useful.
Conrad Hilton
Any time you have two times and two and know it, you are bound to have four.
Conrad Hilton
There was a yoke of responsibility that attached itself firmly the minute someone had trusted me with their capital.
Conrad Hilton
This mean work, work – and more work.
Conrad Hilton
[On San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge] To a young man from the vast emptiness, the deserts and wastelands of the southwest, it was a vision of another world.
Conrad Hilton
There was nothing to do but wait – and we waited. That’s one thing you learn in the Army for sure.
Conrad Hilton
[On buying his first hotel ‘The Mobley’ in Texas from an ‘Oil-Crazy’ man who wanted to get out of the hotel and make real money in the oil fields] He wanted to sell. I wanted to buy. At $40,000 we shook hands.
Conrad Hilton
[After buying ‘The Mobley’] That night we slept in the office and I dreamed of Texas wearing a chain of Hilton hotels. It took some doing to make that dream come true.
Conrad Hilton
[On each time he looked at a hotel being told it was a ‘Dead or dying dump’ by bankers or businessmen] I must have been a positive thinker because none of this daunted me. If these men didn’t share my imagination and vision I knew some who did and I got the money elsewhere.
Conrad Hilton
[On his first real hotel] This hotel’s got too much waste[d] space… That desk is too long by half. And that dining room would take twenty more beds.
Conrad Hilton
The manner in which waste[d] space is unearthed and utilized can mean the difference between a plus and a minus in a operation. And a very exciting part of the game.
Conrad Hilton
I found waste space even in ‘the greatest of them all’. The four columns in the Waldorf-Astoria…
Conrad Hilton
Pride plus incentive. Wages won’t do the whole job.
Conrad Hilton
Texas is the place to make your fortune.
Conrad Hilton
I do believe in luck. But the kind I believe in has to do with people, and being in the right place at the right time, and receptive to new ideas.
Conrad Hilton
In the Army you were as good as your buddies. In Texas you were as good as your partners.
Conrad Hilton
All my life long I have only been as good as my associates, and in them found my good luck, my fortune.
Conrad Hilton
As a youth I was certainly proof against any attempts to make a reader out of me. But now that I was older, and vastly busier, I found a lot of things I wished I knew…
Conrad Hilton
[On starting to become too complacent] I was beginning to be a fat frog in an expanding oil pool.
Conrad Hilton
I was verging on complacent self-satisfaction and I do not know of any single thing that will halt a business career so rapidly.
Conrad Hilton
While the Cisco bank folded, Mrs. Hilton’s oldest son bought diamonds for his mother!
Conrad Hilton
[On buying a Diamond for his mother] She cherished it for twenty-six years. And never wore it once… The thought was right. She cherished that. The gift was wrong. I had picked out something that pleased me… and not something to please her.
Conrad Hilton
If you get a bad [business] partner, buy him out.
Conrad Hilton
The oil rumors plus my hotel sparked a real estate boom and pretty soon the town had everything but money. I opened my hotel the day they brought in a gusher. The well gushed all right. Salt water. Three guests registered across my desk. That was all. No other guests came so I boarded up the doors. It was my first dry hole.
Conrad Hilton
A man’s first million dollar deal may come under the heading of Big Business. To me it spelled Big Adventure…
Conrad Hilton
[On building his first Hilton Hotel and fighting to build each story at a time whilst running out of money] Story by story, I fought my way toward the summit – and there was never a dull moment.
Conrad Hilton
If you want the dull, tame life, if you have no compelling dreams or head for achievement, stay on the ground, away from big business.
Conrad Hilton
An advertisement in a New York paper caught my eye: ‘Need money? See us. We will finance you.’ So I went to New York. The company sold me an insurance policy and lent me exactly nothing.
Conrad Hilton
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