Top 264 CEOs Quotes & Sayings

CEOs are hired for their intellect and business expertise - and fired for a lack of emotional intelligence.

The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy.

The thing that's confusing for investors is that founders don't know how to be CEO. I didn't know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don't know how to be CEOs, but it doesn't mean they can't learn. The question is... can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?

As CEOs or board members, women are still underrepresented, and that gap is actually growing.

I seek out a lot of advice from other CEOs.

CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

I know CEOs, and they get sick when they have to lay people off, especially around Christmas.

I like to take CEOs into consumers' homes to see the "real world." CEOs have privileged lives with big incomes, lots of help, access to just about anything they wish. The average consumer lives on $53,000 a year and has daily tradeoffs and compromises that must be made. I took a CEO into a trailer park so he could observe first-hand - and understand - how consumers use his product.

Whenever teenage girls and corporate CEOs covet the same new technology, something extraordinary is happening.

I don't feel I'm at liberty to speak about the actions of any one CEO. That's not fair; given CEOs have duties to their shareholders.

Willpower is that thing CEOs and professional athletes tell us they used to make it to the top.

One might think of investment managers as astronomers and CEOs as astronauts. The two roles are radically different with distinct personality traits. Like astronomers, investment managers tend to be introverted, skeptical, and very analytical. CEOs, like astronauts, are the exact opposite, typically being extroverts, optimists, and, well, leaders.

It doesn't make much sense and it's nil premium. They're going to have co-CEOs...which is a very uncomfortable structure.

Everything ultimately becomes the CEO's problem, no matter where it starts. I can see why some CEOs crack under the pressure.

I work with CEOs and their executive teams... and very few of these people are really indifferent about their employees or their customers.

When I talk to CEOs, they're not educated about social media.

I think the greatest CEOs in the United States business anyway are the ones you don't hear too much about.

In my line of work, I frequently communicate with CEOs and their executive assistants, and nowhere is the need for gratitude more clear.

There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.

We all aren't in government, we all aren't CEOs, but we all are somebody.

You know, technology CEOs like to think of themselves as rock 'n roll stars.

'Founder' is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.

CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.

Most CEOs are patriotic and most CEOs can see the problems in front of them, and they want to do something about it. We don't always agree about the ways and means, but the objective? We're totally together.

I am far more a fan of aggressive entrepreneurs than I am of major CEOs. You look at major CEOs, and they are almost to a person quite timid. They don't act to defend the free market principles that are vital to growth.

Greed has increasingly become a virtue among Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs in the U.S. Nowhere else in the world do CEOs insist on receiving compensation as high compared to what their employees earn.

Visionary CEOs are product- and business-model-centric and extremely customer focused.

I want little girls to believe that they can be CEOs.

CEOs can stay too long.

CEOs are paid for doing a terrible job. If the system wasn't so messed up, guys like me wouldn't make this kind of money.

The church is not a campus but a community. Pastors are not CEOs; they are shepherds.

Briefcases, like CEOs, should never look new and unused.

Diversity, I think, has become a real business imperative at the very top with CEOs who are facing massive disruption.

In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.

There are woefully few women CEOs in the world, but there can be lots of them in films.

CEOs are called by their first names by young whippersnappers. That makes everybody uncomfortable. We need order and structure back in the workplace.

CEOs will struggle to keep themselves and their companies current, relevant, and ahead of the curve.

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs-as long as no one is watching, anything goes.

I think the greatest CEOs in the United States, business, anyway, are the ones you don't hear too much about.

We must do better for our people by implementing a robust jobs agenda that prioritizes workers - not out-of-state corporations and CEOs.

Matt Bevin has made it clear: he cares more about out-of-state CEOs than Kentucky's working families.

We got CEOs making 200 times the worker's pay, but they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage.

You don't see a lot of MBAs as CEOs. The MBAs tend to get hired by the CEOs.

Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them.

At the end of the day, both men and women who become CEOs have showed tenacity and hard work to succeed in their careers. It takes not just skills but also extreme dedication and commitment. And regardless of gender, CEOs are measured by the same criteria - the growth and success of the business.

For far too long, Congress has been focused on the CEOs, the millionaires, the billionaires.

The days of CEOs getting rich while shareholders lose has got to end. Management must be accountable.

CEOs must embrace the role of serving as the public face of the company to their customer community and the marketplace at large.

We have doctors and lawyers and CEOs as fans.

I think of a traditional CEO as being divorced from customers. A lot of consumer company CEOs - they're not really interacting with consumers.

CEOs of large corporations earn 400 times what their workers make. That is not what America is supposed to be about.

Smart CEOs should be thinking about AI and its impact on their respective business.

CEOs make hard decisions; sometimes, the least worst is the right one.

The helicopter is a fine way to travel, but it induces a view of the world that only God and CEOs share on a regular basis.

If CEOs insist that middle class Americans compete with cheap foreign labor, why not outsource the jobs of CEOs? If business is all about cost, they should be the first to volunteer.

Last year, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell conducted a survey of chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies for his book Blink. He discovered that while in the US population 14.5 per cent of all men are 6ft (1.83m) or taller, among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies the proportion is 58 per cent. And while 3.9 per cent of American adults are 6ft 2in or taller, almost a third of the CEOs were that tall.

There are major CEOs who do not know how to hold a knife and fork properly, but I don't worry about that as much as the lack of kindness.

Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.

I've always been of the view that two-term presidency rule is a pretty good one and CEOs shouldn't overstay their welcome.