“Your business and its future are in the hands of the people you hire.”

I often say to my assistants, “Never trust anybody,” but what I mean is that you should never trust someone else to do a job exactly the way you would want it done.

There is no secret ingredient or hidden formula responsible for the success of the best Japanese companies.

We want everybody to have the best facilities in which to work, but we do not believe in posh and impressive private offices.

If management take the risk of hiring them, we have to take the responsibility for them.

The “patron saint” of Japanese quality control, ironically, is an American named W. Edwards Deming, who was virtually unknown in his own country until his ideas of quality control began to make such a big impact on Japanese companies.

We don’t believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.

My solution to the problem of unleashing creativity is always to set up a target.

If we do our best and make efforts, a peaceful and great future will become ours without fail.

I believe it is a big mistake to think that money is the only way to compensate a person for his work.

A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.

We want to keep the company healthy and its employees happy, and we want to keep them on the job and productive.

To have any one of these without the others is self defeating in business.

Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.

I knew we needed a weapon to break through to the US market, and it had to be something different, something that nobody else was making.

Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.

I established the rule that once we hire an employee, his school records are a matter of the past and are no longer used to evaluate his work or decide on his promotion.

I wanted to be more hands on. Otherwise, every time you finish acting in a movie you have to almost go and beg people for the next job.

That moment I felt a bit like crying. I don’t really know why. Nana’s hand felt so warm that it even warmed my heart.

As expected life isn’t that sweet at all. When I came to Tokyo I thought I could achieve anything with my own two hands. It’s not like that.

Question your thoughts. Question your stories. Question your assumptions. Question your opinions. Question your conclusions. Question them all into utter emptiness, stillness and joy. The keys to freedom are in your hands. Use them.

Mass production is nothing new. Weren’t cathedrals built through mass production? The pyramids?

Whatever has “wit enough to keep it sweet” defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.