Sam Walton Quotes

“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves it's amazing what they can accomplish.”

“If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them—not that they are working for you.”

“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.”

“My role has been to pick good people, and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.”

“I have never been one to dwell on reverses…it's not just a corny saying that you can make a positive out of most any negative if you work at it hard enough.”

“I can tell you this: though: after a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Walmart's phenomenal success has been that very tendency.”

“Individuals don't win; teams do.”

“Lose your smile and lose your customers.”

“High expectations are the key to everything.”

“We let folks know we're interested in them and that they're vital to what we're doing here.”

“There's absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they're given the opportunity and encouragement.”

“To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.”

“First he learned all the rules. Then he broke all the rules which did not make sense to him — which meant almost all of them.”

“I had no vision of the scope of what I would start. But I always had confidence that as long as we did our work well and were good to our customers, there would be no limit to us.”

“I'm really sick these days, and I guess when you get older, and illness catches up with you, you naturally turn just a little bit philosophical — especially late at night when you can't sleep and your mind is turning everything over and over trying to take stock of where you've been and what you've done.”

“It's paper anyway. It was paper when we started and it's paper afterward.”

“You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.”

“If we work together, we'll lower the cost of living for everyone. We'll give the world an opportunity to see what it's like to save and to have a better life.”

“There's absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they're given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best.”