Jeff Bezos

"Real estate prices are probably near the top of their peak in many markets, and that will change."

"Advertising is the price you pay for having a mediocre product."

"If you don't understand the details of your business, you are going to fail."

"What we want is to be left alone to run the business, and put the profits to good use."

"I think we're at the beginning of something that's going to change a lot about how we think about reading."

"The balance between work-life is something each person has to define for themselves."

"A company can have the best products in the world, but if it doesn't listen to its customers, it will fail."

"We live in the physical world and that will always matter, even as we do more and more in the virtual world."

"I think long-term thinking, customer focus, and frugality are the key drivers of value creation in business."

"The dot-com boom was irrational exuberance; the dot-com bust is irrational despair."

"I've always believed that if you work hard and treat people well, good things will happen."

"We've had three big ideas at Amazon: low prices, vast selection, and fast delivery."

"Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room."

"There are two kinds of companies: those that work hard to charge more and those that work hard to charge less."

"I think that we have to accept that this universe that we live in is shot through with magic."

"The companies that are great at responding to crises are the ones that have good fundamentals."

"Taking care of customers is paramount, not a side effect."

"I wanted to invent something new, but I realized that to do that, I had to go into an area where I could fail."

"The best business decisions are often those that seem unreasonable at the time to most people."

"I believe that good ideas come from everywhere in an organization."

"We started with the vision of offering low prices and great selection online."

"Being good at failure is an essential skill for any innovator."

"The most dangerous way to improve a business is to continuously optimize for what you know."

"I knew that books would be the first thing to go digital, and I saw an opportunity."

"You need to be willing to be misunderstood and to do things that people don't understand initially."

"Every business needs to be thinking about what comes next and how to prepare for it."

"The most important principle is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer."

"I think frugality drives innovation the same way other constraints do. When you have to do more with less, you become creative."

"We hire people smarter than us and we get out of their way."

"What we've found is that customers really do appreciate when you invent on their behalf."