Ross Perot Quotes
120 Ross Perot Quotes
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People have been trying to get me to buy sports teams for years. I always ask, ‘How much does it cost, and how much does it make?’ The place gets real quiet in a hurry.
Ross Perot
As a young man I wanted to be a pearl. Unfortunately, my lot in life is to be the grain of sand that irritates the oyster.
Ross Perot
When you’re on top you tend to be vulnerable. When you don’t have to hunt anymore, some kids knocks you off. Keep yourself in shape by climbing the mountain.
Ross Perot
Reward workers while the sweat’s still on their brow.
Ross Perot
I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it.
Ross Perot
Any activist is the guy who cleans the rivers, not the guy who concludes it’s dirty.
Ross Perot
It takes five years to develop a new car in this country. Heck, we won World War II in four years.
Ross Perot
The day I made Eagle Scout was more important to me than the day I discovered I was a billionaire.
Ross Perot
Failures are like skinned knees – painful but superficial.
Ross Perot
[On becoming wealthy] It’s kind of like Halley’s Comet. It just comes around every so often and hits somebody. It happened to have hit me.
Ross Perot
From my point of view, the less publicity the better. No publicity at all is the ideal.
Ross Perot
Making all this money is partly an accident. I could have put the same amount of energy into a corporation that made steel forgings, but I would have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had an opportunity to be in the right place, and I have an obligation to do something creative.
Ross Perot
All my cars are GM, and I bargained with the dealer over every one of them. You gotta watch your money.
Ross Perot
I don’t want to leave a vast estate to my children – I don’t want to deny them the advantages I had, which come from making your own way in the world. Consequently, I’m not leaving them anything – except, I hope, a better America in which they can make their way.
Ross Perot
A man is never more on trial than in a moment of excessive good fortune.
Ross Perot
[To Steve Jobs] If you ever need an investor, call me.
Ross Perot
I pick the jockeys, and the jockeys pick the horses and ride them. You guys are the ones I’m betting on, so you figure it out.
Ross Perot
In terms of a startup company, it’s one that carries the least risk of any I’ve seen in 25 years in the computer industry. We’ve had some sophisticated people see the hardware – it blew them away. Steve and his whole NeXT team are the darnedest bunch of perfectionists I’ve ever seen.
Ross Perot
So poor he couldn’t afford to go to college, working in his garage at night, playing with computer chips, which was his hobby, and his dad who looks like a character out of a Norman Rockwell painting – comes in one day and said, ‘Steve, either make something you can sell or go get a job.’ Sixty days later, in a wooden box that his dad made for him, the first Apple computer was created. And this high school graduate literally changed the world.
Ross Perot
Steve’s [Jobs] like me. We’re weird in the same way. We’re soul mates.
Ross Perot
I am not a legend, but I am a myth.
Ross Perot
My mother used to say, ‘Ross, a little of you goes a long way.’ I guess quite a few people today would agree.
Ross Perot
We’re all what we were taught to be. You sit there in that little house in Texarkana and see your mother doing things like (feeding the hungry) when you’re a child, that’s the greatest lesson in the world.
Ross Perot
Rockwell painted what I strived to be.
Ross Perot
[On Christmas presents] My father sold a horse to have enough money for presents. That really bothered me because I knew how he loved that horse. But it also showed us how much he loved us.
Ross Perot
My business success stems mainly from having sat in my dad’s cotton brokerage office, watching him build trust and confidence among the farmers. After a while he started letting me trade horses and cattle. I had to buy and sell the same day. ‘You don’t take ‘em home,’ he said, ‘because then you’ve got to feed ‘em.’ Under his tutelage I learned how to negotiate.
Ross Perot
I was working jobs like boys did just to make a little money: breaking horses, roofing barns, stringing barbed wire. If you had stopped me and said, ‘Son, what do you want to do when you grow up?’ I’m sure I would have said I want to get enough education so I can work indoors.
Ross Perot
As a boy growing up in Texarkana, Texas, during the Depression, I had many summer jobs, including breaking horses at $1.50 per horse, selling the Saturday Evening Post, selling Christmas cards, selling garden seeds, cutting grass with a manual lawnmower for $1 for a normal-sized yard, roofing barns, digging fence holes and stringing barbed-wire fences.
Ross Perot
I threw newspapers for whore houses. I knew all the women. I threw papers to flop houses, to some of the poorest people in the world. They tried to hold me up every Saturday… They weren’t bad people. They were desperate. I learned that no matter how poor people are, they’re good people and those are things you can’t learn at Harvard Business School.
Ross Perot
[On delivering a paper route in a poor neighborhood] I found out that by giving these people good service they paid promptly. I’d put the paper behind their door. That was kind of an interesting thing, for them to have a white boy on a horse, whether it was raining or not, bringing the paper to them and giving them the same service white people got. I had customer loyalty I’ll never have again.
Ross Perot
Four years at sea, two years on a destroyer. Got on at 2 o’clock in the morning, and nine months later I’d gone all the way around the world. That’s a terrific experience for a boy from Texas who had never been anywhere.
Ross Perot
One of the great blessings is that nobody taught me how to manage people. Instead, for four years I was taught and shown by example how to lead people. There is a fundamental difference.
Ross Perot
I have found the Navy to be a fairly Godless organization. I do not enjoy the prospect of being subjected to drunken tales of moral emptiness, passing out the penicillin pills and seeing promiscuity on the part of married men.
Ross Perot
I loved the Navy, loved the sea, loved ships. But I always find whatever I’m doing, I’m thoroughly involved in it. In the Navy, the promotion system and the seniority system and the waiting-in-line system concept were just sort of incompatible with my desire to be measured and judged by what I could produce.
Ross Perot
I am about as unmilitary as anybody you can find in terms of being informal. If we hadn’t had a sense of humor when I was growing up, we wouldn’t have made it.
Ross Perot
When I went to the Naval Academy, I got a short haircut and liked it. It’s efficient. You don’t have to waste time combing it.
Ross Perot
[Opinion of business suits] Camouflage for the corporate jungle.
Ross Perot
People wrote I shop at K-Mart . I’m in and out of K-Mart. I’m in and out of Sears. I’m in and out of Penney’s. I’m in and out of Neiman-Marcus. Someone wrote that at the Churchill dinner my tuxedo didn’t look as good as Prince Charles! I bought it off the rack, but I had it pressed. I thought it looked all right.
Ross Perot
Historically in our country, the individual who makes the money has to be a cartoon character. We’re stuck with that.
Ross Perot
Talking about myself is sort of a waste of time. I’ve lived only one life. It’s been over documented. Half of it is truth. Half of it is myth. I would think readers are probably sick of it. I’m sick of it.
Ross Perot
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