Jeff Bezos Quotes

Wisdom means to choose now what will make sense later.

The opportunist thinks of me and today. The statesman thinks of us and tomorrow.

Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It's the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

My father said that I could always become an actress, but I couldn't go back to college later in life. So I had to first finish my education, and then I could do what I wanted. At the time, I was not pleased, but now, I can't thank him enough. My parents were absolutely right.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

To be honest, I'm not the kind of guy to think about the future in the long term.

I know I made plenty of mistakes in my tenure. But one of the things that you learn is to be very careful and to protect yourself down the road a little bit, which is to say you've got to think ahead and think where is the story going to go? What are all the possible outcomes? And how do I protect the president from unexpected twists and turns in the road?

Hold your Council before Dinner; the full Belly hates Thinking as well as Acting.

Men who think in lifetimes are of little use to statesmanship.

The Congress is not willing to think about the long term. They act like activist shareholders, to use that phrase again. They're not thinking about what can we do that will make us richer, safer, and stronger next year, and the year after, and five and 10 years out.

I think the biggest single thing that causes difficulty in the business world is the short-term view. We become obsessed with it. But it forces bad decisions.

I think all presidents should take the long view of history.

Whatever a leader does now sets up what he does later. And there's always a later.

Foresight is not about predicting the future, it's about minimizing surprise.

I'm no genius. I'm not at all; I just happen to look five or 10 years ahead and think things through.

I never think of what it's going to be like later. I only think in the present tense. The only time I think backwards is when I have to reissue something.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it’s the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment.

My job is to think beyond the immediate.

If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish.

We're really at this point where we can take a step back and think about the next big things that we want to do.

No one ever thinks about what the hell is going to happen 25 years from now.

Whatever you do, don’t wake up at 65 years old and think about what you should have done with your life.

When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.