Charles Koch Quotes

Embrace change. Envision what could be, challenge the status quo, and drive creative destruction.

I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington.

A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value.

Success is one of the worst enemies of success, because success tends to breed complacency and lack of humility.

Successful companies create value by providing products or services their customers value more highly than available alternatives. They do this while consuming fewer resources, leaving more resources available to satisfy other needs in society. Value creation involves making people's lives better. It is contributing to prosperity in society.

Hubris, arrogance, is just one step ahead of loss of integrity, because if you think you're better than other people, you know more, then you're going to think, as many leaders have, that the rules don't apply to them - so they lose their integrity.

To do meaningful work is to contribute - to create value in society.

To be happy you have to fulfill your nature. That's what Aristotle taught so many centuries ago, that the road to happiness isn't to go drink more or consume more. The road to happiness is to fully develop your abilities, and then apply them to do good.

When everyone gets something for nothing, soon no one will have anything, because no one will be producing anything.

We must measure what leads to results, not simply what is easy to measure.

The only way you improve is to try new things.

Best part of my job is fulfillment. When I see that, that we're creating value, that we're helping improve people's lives, and we benefit from it, so it's a system of mutual benefit. Our philosophy's working. That's what turns me on. That's what keeps me going.

If you never failed, then you're probably not doing very much.

Most companies want free enterprise in general because that produces better goods and services and makes people's lives better, but they don't want it in their business. They want protection from competition, they want subsidies, they want the government to pick winners and losers, and they want to be picked as winners, and that's what we're opposing, and that's what drives my whole efforts in policy, and in the political arena.

Do you want to have your feelings hurt a little bit because you have some negative feedback, or do you want to continue down the disastrous track you're on and have a huge disaster? Talk about a bruised ego. It may ruin your career.

A classical liberal is someone who wants a society that maximizes peace, civility, tolerance, and well-being for everyone. One that opens opportunities for everyone to advance themselves.

But it [crony capitalism] erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.

I try to hire people who will challenge and have the humility to be challenged - people who have basically good values.

I want my legacy to be greater freedom, greater prosperity and a better way of life for my family, our employees and all Americans. And I wish the same for every nation on earth.

A lot of the Republican rhetoric better than the Democrats'. But when they're in office, it's pretty much the same thing. It's serving their supporters, it's corporate welfare, it's cronyism which is so destructive, particularly to the disadvantaged.

I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.

There are now businesses and entire industries that exist solely as a result of federal patronage. Profiting from government instead of earning profits in the economy, such businesses can continue to succeed even if they are squandering resources and making products that people wouldn't ordinarily buy.

We strive to hire and retain only those who embrace our MBM® Guiding Principles, which encompass integrity, compliance, value creation, Principled Entrepreneurship, customer focus, knowledge, change, humility, respect and fulfillment.

To end cronyism we must end government's ability to dole out favors and rig the market.

Most power is power to coerce somebody. We don't have the power to coerce anybody.

My view on well-being and fulfillment comes from Maslow and positive psychology, and that is that you're satisfying three sets of needs. First need is physiological and safety needs: Got to satisfy those first. And the second is you got to satisfy your community needs because we're social animals, and if we don't have that, we're empty and we don't have people to share knowledge and bounce things off of, and challenge ourselves. And then the third is the idea is to find a calling.

The poorest Americans use three time the energy as the percentage of their income as the average American does. This is going to disproportionately hurt the poor. It may make the whole electric grid unstable, depending on how it is enforced. And it does nothing for the climate.

What hermeneutics teaches is that progress comes from being exposed to different points of views because there's no point of view that is right for all situations and all times. And even if it's superior to the others, you can enrich it by drawing on others or thinking: "Why is that wrong and how do I improve my approach? How do I come up with a better approach?" So that's essential for innovation just like it is in technology.

The easy way to make money is to get special political privilege. From the beginning of time, business has cozied up to government and gotten restrictions on competition and subsidies and stuff.

If there is wrong, you don't say we have to get rid of it gradually. If injustice exists, you need to eliminate it immediately.

We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries.

So to the best we can, what we do is focus on creating value for others, and how do we do that? We do it by trying to produce products and services that our customers will value more than their alternatives, and not just their alternatives today, but what the alternatives will be in the future. We try to more efficiently use resources than our competitors, and constantly improve in that, and we try to do the best job we can in creating a safe environment, and environmental excellence, and constantly improve at that.

Repeatedly asking for government help undermines the foundations of society by destroying initiative and responsibility. It is also a fatal blow to efficiency and corrupts the political process.

When you start attacking cronyism and peoples political interests, it gets nasty.

That's the first rule for anybody who controls - do no harm.

Our vision controls the way we think and, therefore, the way we act the vision we have of our jobs determines what we do and the opportunities we see or don't see.

I always wanted to be different and do things differently. I was a pain in the neck. I was challenging everything you wanted me to do and challenging people in school.

As an engineer, I understood that the natural world operated according to fixed laws. Through my studies, I came to realize that there were, likewise, laws that govern human wellbeing. It seemed to me that these laws are fundamental not only to the wellbeing of societies, but also to the miniature societies of organizations. Indeed, that is what we found when we began to apply these principles systematically at Koch Industries. Through our observation of how they could create prosperity in an organization, I began to systematize my beliefs into Market-Based Management.

My father wanted to instill the work ethic. And, because he knew if you don't learn to work to be more productive to improve your efficiency, to cooperate with other people at an early age, you may never learn those habits.

Putting aside all the things that are said about Hillary [Clinton], my main difference with her is on the vision of what kind of society will make people's lives better. So this is a vision of society in which people are too evil or stupid to run their own lives, but those in power are perfectly capable of running everybody else's lives because they're so much smarter.

Years later, when I asked my father, I said 'Pop, why were you so much harder on me than my younger brothers?' he said, son, you plum wore me out.

The role of business is to provide products and services that make people's live better - while using fewer resources - and to act lawfully and with integrity. Businesses that do this through voluntary exchanges not only benefit through increased profits, they bring better and more competitively priced goods and services to market. This creates a win-win situation customers and companies alike.

We try to evaluate how much value an employee is creating here and reward them accordingly.

A lot of what is done by the climate lobby is anti-science. But there is some science behind it. Like, there are greenhouse gases, and they do contribute to warming. But if you look at the last, say, 160 years, the first 80 of that period, they went up about four-tenths of a degree. And now, the second 80 that CO2 has increased by, what, 30 percent or something, it's gone up five-tenths of a degree. And there's been in the last 30 or 40 years, there's been no real increase in storms or bad weather.

They say your genetics are going to set your direction regardless of what happens, but I think there's more to it than that.

The old idea that some genius pulls all of this stuff out of the air is ridiculous. As Ridley pointed out, the only way Edison could invent the lightbulb is because all the elements had been developed before. That's obvious it wasn't just his genius - 20 others developed it at the same time. And that's true for almost every invention and discovery.

I don't have all the answers. I have a lot of questions. And I have some basic principles.

Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers.

Let's say I am a chocoholic and I eat tons of chocolate a day. A hundred thousands of tons a day. I have this craving, but I can't afford it, so I get a printing press, and I start printing money, and I print billions and billions to buy chocolate. So I create this boom in the chocolate industry, so stores are running out of chocolate. So they have demand, so chocolate makers expand. Cocoa growers expand. You create this great boom. But now the feds arrest me and shut me down. And now there is a depression in the chocolate industry. That's what happens with the monetary policy.

My father announced early on that he didn't want his sons to be "country club bums." And for a number of reasons, I bore the brunt of that - I have an older brother and two younger brothers. So he had me work in all my spare time. I started out picking dandelions, shoveling stalls, milking cows, building a fence - whatever dirty job was out there. That's a big deal, because you learn things working that you don't learn in school.