Tom Murphy Quotes

“There's no substitute for being a good business, and there are not many of them.”

“I'm seventy-five years old now—you recognize that the only thing that's important is your family and your friends. Business is just a way to live your life so that you can have a nice life for your family and make good friends.”

“The goal is not to have the longest train, but to arrive at the station first using the least fuel.”

“Most of what I learned about management, I learned from Murph. I kick myself, because I should have applied it much earlier.”

“Tom Murphy and Dan Burke were probably the greatest two-person combination in management that the world has ever seen, or maybe ever will see.”

“To be blessed with good health is a great luxury. Fortunately, I've had that for many, many years.”

“I think (Murphy) is the top manager in the U.S.”

“The greatest blessing in the world, outside of being an American, is to have good health.”

“To be a workaholic never appealed to me.”

“Most of what I learned about management, I learned from Murph.”

“If you learned the lessons of Tom Murphy, you don't need to learn any other lessons.”

“Tom Murphy has taught me more about running a business than any other person.”

“My only regret is that I didn't meet him earlier.”

“Business is just a way to live your life so that you can have a nice life for your family and make good friends.”

“There are not many great businesses that come along in a lifetime. In 1954, television was just starting. People were losing a lot of money in the business, but it was about to explode. Because of the limited availability of licenses, there was limited competition, and so it exploded over the next thirty or forty years. I was very fortunate to be in broadcasting.”

“If Murph should elect to run another business, don't bother to study its value — just buy the stock.”

“Charlie, I was thinking that it gave me the chance to run something. I was 29 years of age and I thought I could run something. I didn't necessarily have any reason to think that, I just inside felt I could.”

“We just kept opportunistically buying assets, intelligently leveraging the company, improving operations and then we'd take a bite of something else.”

“Over the years I watched him inspire very imperfect humans — myself certainly included. Motivated by Tom, some became better parents, others more generous, and some were encouraged to lead in a kinder way.”

“He was a deeply principled man, setting and demanding high standards, always living up to them, and never compromising ethics in the service of business... To me, he was more than a mentor. He was a father figure.”