Malcolm Forbes Quotes

Anybody can get bigheaded once they know the seat cannot be pulled out from under them.

I had this attitude, that Silicon Valley obnoxious attitude, that I know what I'm doing, and the rest was going to be pretty easy.

When you have any kind of success in life, that's like the most dangerous moment that you're in because you're going to tend to think wow, I can just keep repeating what I've done. I'm a great person. People love me. All of the sudden they're giving me all of this attention. You get drunk on it and you lose your sense of balance and your sense of detachment. I know it's happened to me.

Success is always dangerous. It can make an asshole out of anybody.

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

Anyone who thinks they're indispensible is fooling themselves.

When you start believing you're something special, then you're not going to be striving to move forward.

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

Be careful of success; it has a dark side.

Thinking you're a genius is death.

The minute I get a big head and start acting like the big man on campus, it's all downhill from there.

Always beware your moment of triumphalism: such emotions are a poor steer on the future.

I believe that people start to get into trouble when they start to believe their own hype.

Bonfire of the Vanities: The lesson of that book is, never start believing your own press.

I've been a golden boy for too long.

As far as big egos, there are definitely guys out there that just think God only knows what about themselves.

Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.

If I was sharp in every area, I might be too big-headed or something.

In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.

Whenever I've had success, I never learn from it. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris. When you fail, that's when you learn.

Self-conceit may lead to self destruction.

Smart, well-meaning people get it wrong when they start believing that the world owes them something and that the rules are different for them.

Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way.

The worst thing you could ever get is people who think they know everything.

The worst thing that can happen for a writer is for a writer to start believing their own press. I think the industry, and the comics industry in particular, is littered with the bodies of writers who believed their own press. And you can see the moment they did, and then the work nosedives.