Jeff Bezos's Quotes

You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

You want your customers to value your service.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet - how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business.

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it's not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that's not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.

The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.

If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it's so easy to be motivated.

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

What's dangerous is not to evolve.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

Ebooks had to happen.

For many people, extended reading sessions on an LCD display cause eyestrain.

I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

I like having the digital camera on my smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take real pictures.