Integrity is critical to our lives - and to our dreams of achievement. We must remember that without integrity, nothing else matters and that with integrity, nothing else matters.
Never quit believing that you can develop in life. Never give up. Don't deny the inward spirit that provides the drive to accomplish great things in life.
Sometimes in life, we try to do our very best to help others, and in the process, it brings some anguish to us. But we can't ever let that stop us. We can't ever be stopped from helping others and allowing them to have some sense of happiness and joy in their life.
Always make your team around you feel like you are succeeding, even though you know, way down deep, it's a long shot. You have to be the fighter and the leader and the one who instills energy and hope in others.
When I bought companies, it was done on trust, on a one-on-one basis, and with the intention of taking care of employees. Today, it's about who can bid the highest. There's no personal interest. It's a different world and one that an entrepreneur like me doesn't like much.
I had the good fortune to be raised in the 1940s and the 1950s. As I entered business in the late 1950s and 1960s, America was just coming into its own as a great industrial power. It allowed young entrepreneurs to start their engines, to start their businesses, to borrow a little money and to leverage what they had.
I would say to you, have faith in yourself - believe in what you are doing, and, most important, be a person of integrity. It is totally up to you, and no one else, how your life evolves.
I think corporations and people are very different. People make corporations whatever it is that they're going to be.
We're in business to relieve human suffering, to help feed the poor, to provide education and culture - but above all else, we're concerned with the relief of human suffering.
Being raised in Idaho, you think everyone is poor. Then you see the wider world.
If people are going to give, they're going to give. And it doesn't matter if you give a dollar or five dollars or a hundred dollars or a million dollars; it's all according to your ability.
If someone said, 'Jon, we need $250 million a year from now and we can make a dramatic breakthrough for ovarian cancer,' I'd have $250 million in two months. You just work day and night if the cause in your heart is justified.
You're in the game of life to fight. If you're in business, and you're not aggressively building, you shouldn't be in.
Everyone has always underestimated a company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. The New York boys thought they could take me on, that nobody out here has any knowledge or wisdom.
I love to give money away. I don't know if it makes my children and grandchildren all that happy.
All men and women need a roof over their heads and need to be fed and have proper health care. I don't know that I believed that, or even understood that, in the early days.
People who put money in the church basket and people who go to church and pay the pastor: that isn't real philanthropy; that's just like you belong to a country club. You pay your dues to belong to that church, so you pay your tithing or whatever it is.
I have always given money away. I haven't always been wealthy - the opposite, in fact. But I have always felt that I wanted people to share it with me.
As a senior in high school with no money working several jobs, I was sent to a wonderful school on the East Coast by a wonderful Jewish man. I've never forgotten that. I've sent over 5,000 young people to school around the world in memory of him because he was so gracious to me.
We should never have any political or religious organization filter our news.
