Harry Gordon Selfridge

The boss drives his men; the leader coaches them.The boss says 'Go'; the leader says 'Let's go.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

Right or wrong, .

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

To write on Commerce or Trade and do the subject justice would require more volumes than any library could hold, and involve more detail than any mind could grasp. It would be a history in extenso of the world's people from the beginning of time. For we are all merchants, and all races of men have been merchants in some form or another.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

The desire to trade seems to be inherent in man, as natural to him as the instinct of self-preservation, and from earliest recorded history we see trade and barter entering into and becoming part of the lives of men of all nations... [W]e see it as one of the most desirable objectives of the nations themselves.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

Ever since that moment when two individuals first lived upon this earth, one has had what the other wanted, and has been willing for a consideration to part with his possession. This is the principle underlying all trade however primitive, and all men, except the idlers, are merchants.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

[W]ithout Commerce there is no wealth.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

Commerce creates wealth, and it is the foundation of the great state. Armies are raised and paid for to win, or to protect the countries' trade, or commerce. Ships are constructed, colonies established, inventions encouraged, governments built up, or pulled down, for Commerce. Commerce cuts the way, and all professions, all arts follow.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

If Commerce is necessary to wealth, no Commerce means no wealth, and our statesman soon finds himself out of employment. Where wealth again is greatest, everything else being fairly equal, arts thrive the most.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

Commerce is the mother of the arts, the sciences, the professions, and in this twentieth century has itself become an art, a science, a profession.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

One of the chief differences between the commerce of the sixteenth century and of the twentieth lies in the wonderful and complicated organizations of the present day. Their magnitude makes even the largest of those of which we have been reading seem insignificant.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

The Phoenicians a thousand years before the Christian era were fearless, progressive and splendid, but... [t]hey traded individually as did the Venetians and even the great s of Augsburg, leaving no trace of that ability which selects and teaches others to assist in any remarkable enterprise.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

The world is smaller. Steam and electricity, great ships, railways and many recorded experiences have made it so; but as the circumference of this earth has seemed to diminish its commercial undertakings have grown greater.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

Men of genius and wonderful nerve and determination, who in the Dark Ages would have been conquering princes, have... thrown their ability into Commerce and have conquered, not territory and slaves, but trade and its child, money, from any and every part of the world where trade was to be found.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

The last hundred years have shown... that one man cannot do it all, and that anyone who attempts to hold within his two hands all the threads of a great business of the present day fails to achieve the greatest success.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

No one has more than a given number of minutes... in which he can work, and no matter how great his ability he will soon find his limitations. If, however, he uses that ability in finding and teaching others as capable as himself, or in certain details even more so, the limits to his sphere of operations are hard to set.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

This ability... to organize, to breathe into others that fire of enthusiasm, that quality of judgment, that spirit of progress, has long been considered by thinking men of commerce as the final and greatest of all qualities, the test of supreme commercial genius.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

Imagination must be drawn upon, risks must be assumed. "Nothing venture, nothing have" is perhaps truer of the department store than of any other enterprise.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

Bigness alone is nothing, but bigness filled with the activity that does everything continually better means much.

— Harry Gordon Selfridge

The floors are of marble or mosaic or are covered with hundreds of thousands of yards of carpets. The lifts are almost without number...

— Harry Gordon Selfridge