Sam Walton Quotes

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Sam Walton

Profession : Businessman

Birth : March 29, 1918

Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.

Sam Walton

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

Sam Walton

Capital isn't scarce; vision is.

Sam Walton

Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.

Sam Walton

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

Sam Walton

Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.

Sam Walton

What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?

Sam Walton

You can make a lot of 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.

Sam Walton

Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don't know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.

Sam Walton

In the beginning, I was so chintzy I really didn't pay my employees well.

Sam Walton

I've never been one to dwell on reverses.

Sam Walton

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

Sam Walton

I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.

Sam Walton

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.

Sam Walton

I don't know what would have happened to Wal-Mart if we had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator.

Sam Walton

I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.

Sam Walton