Sam Walton Quotes

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

You can learn from everybody.

We let folks know we're interested in them and that they're vital to us. cause they are.

Expenses should never exceed one percent of our purchases.

All that hullabaloo about somebody's net worth is just stupid, and it's made my life a lot more complex and difficult.

There is only one boss. The customer.

Capital isn't scarce; vision is.

Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.

After a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-mart's phenomenal success has been that very tendency.

It was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some families sell their stocks off a little bit at a time to live high, and then - boom - somebody takes them over, and it all goes down the drain.

I was asked what I thought about the recession. I thought about it and decided not to take part.

High expectations is the key to everything.

Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs.

Curiosity doesn't kill the cat; it kills the competition.

Most everything I've done I've copied from somebody else.

I've owned about 18 airplanes over the years, and I've never bought one of them new.

I not only knew I wanted to go into retailing, I also knew I wanted to go into business for myself.

I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.

I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart.

I guess in all my years, what I heard more than anything else was: a mere town cannot support a discount store for very long.

I loved retail from the beginning, and I still love it today.

One thing my and mother and dad shared completely was their approach to money - they just didn't spend it.

It is unhealthy to marinate in your own press clippings.

There’s a lot more business out there in small town America than I ever dreamed of.

It's just paper - all I own is a pickup truck and a little Wal-Mart stock.

Capital isn't hard to find; intuition, yes.

I've always been driven to buck the system.

The job of senior management is to cultivate an environment where store managers can learn from the market and from each other.

I learned this early on in the variety business: You've got to give folks responsibility, you've got to trust them, and then you've got to check on them.

All of us profit from being corrected - if we're corrected in a positive way.

Give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.

If everybody is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.

We're all working together that's the secret.

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.