Phil Knight Quotes

Look at how many times we've improved on the Game Boy Advance in terms of the look, the feel, screen changes, and everything else. We believe that type of constant innovation is critical to driving this industry, and certainly if you look at the world wide sales of Game Boy Advance, I don't think anyone would disagree.

It had always made sense to me to build a business based on what people really wanted, rather than guess what we thought they might want.

I don't think anyone has done a [tablet] product that I see customers wanting.

The current climate doesn't represent a threat to the production of art but to the market. I think it's time for artists to get over auction houses, galleries, and high-production-value exhibitions and start using our voices again.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

If people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual.

Ah, my Knight in Shining Armor. What, you don't think I can fend for myself?

You say: "I'm a blue sky thinker." Investor thinks: "You have no business model, and you don't know how to ship."

The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.

Everybody wants to make something they think is a surefire winner, though nobody knows what a surefire winner is, in my opinion.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

Market-driven design builds the success of the product's marketing into the product itself.

A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.

Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

So my resolution this year is: I'm not a money guy, but I want to make our next product a commercial success, so that people will say, 'Hey, there's a huge market out there. If you make a high-quality games that can touch people, it's going to do great business.

When the cartoonist is trying to talk honestly and seriously about life, then I believe he has a responsibility to think beyond satisfying the market's every whim and desire.

I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?

I think one big improvement would be if we somehow made it cheaper and easier for developing countries to learn from the sad experience of some of the developed countries, and also from some of the positive experiences we have of building good transportation systems, like high-speed rail.

In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education - not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs where new ways are wrought ... nothing has been so rare in recent years as an Ivy League graduate who has made a significant innovation in American enterprise.

Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

I wish I could tell you the recipe for figuring out who the target user is for your product and who your users should be, but... there isn't a recipe. It comes down to think really hard and use your judgement to figure out who you're really building this for.

I am free to make anything I want as long as I think it will sell.

Lab to land - how to get what is done in the lab to the land, to the farmer.

I think what's made electronic music so fascinating is that it came up through the underground and always moved and pivoted so quickly that you could never keep a handle on it. That continues to happen. Sure, the stuff on the very top moves slower and is marketed for Spotify. But there are still going to be undercurrents that flow freely and move around, simply because there's too much of a base with this music.

I love horses. I think I may have been one of Henry VIII’s knights in another life, riding through a great forest.