“The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn’t have on things he doesn’t need — we’re done for.”

Both the liberal and the conservative are in agreement: it is all very well to let the people alone, but only if they do what you want them to do.

There is no bad weather, just soft runners.

The world, then, no longer resembles the one that gave rise to the original insight. Soon, a person’s situation is so at odds with the world as it really is that a crisis develops, and he or she must seek a new metaphor for explanation and guidance.

Only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people. Commonly held ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies… and often dangerous ones.

I think people can handle 150 to 200 miles a week. But something has to give somewhere. If he’s a student, how’s he going to study? He may be at the age of chasing and courtship, and that’s an important form of sport and recreation, too.

A teacher is never too smart to learn from his pupils. But while runners differ, basic principles never change.

A man’s wealth can…also be measured by what he doesn’t have and doesn’t want. When he wants little, he is a rich man.

So it’s a matter of fitting your current practices to fit the event and the individual. See, what’s good for you might not be worth a darn for the next guy.

Once vast numbers of people have come to believe the lie, they adjust their own behavior to bring themselves into sync with it, and thereby change the world itself.

People are upset. They know something is wrong. But they don’t know what. The real explanation is too complicated. They won’t sit still for it. So, they look for scapegoats – the rich…the banks…the Chinese.

That is the problem with age and wisdom—it merely shows you how helpless you are. The wiser you become, the more you learn to keep your mouth shut, until eventually the grave silences you forever.

Several of my critics have said, ‘Bowerman just tacks up a piece of paper in the locker room and turns his runners loose.’ They’re partially right. I do give the athletes a relatively free rein and for good reason. One of my principles is? ‘Don’t overcoach.’

Harness the Power of Accelerated Failure – the faster you fail, the faster you succeed.

There’s no such thing as bad weather, just soft people.

I still bother with runners I call hamburgers. They’re never going to run any record times. But they can fulfill their own potential.

Now it is done by the central bankers and Treasury Secretaries themselves. They don’t apologize for it. They don’t hang their heads and contemplate blowing their brains out. Instead, they’re proud of it… announcing that they ‘saved civilization,’ or some such claptrap.

Disco deserved a better name, a beautiful name because it was a beautiful art form. It made the consumer beautiful. The consumer was the star.

The real bosses in the capitalist system of market economy are the consumers. They by their buying and by their abstention from buying decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.

A UK-Australia trade deal won’t just be a good thing, it’ll be a great thing, for our businesses, for our consumers, for our workers and for our two great countries.

The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.

The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

If the government was as afraid of disturbing the consumer as it is of disturbing business, this would be some democracy.