Seeing the world around you clearly is a critical step in developing an idea for a business, carrying out that idea, and then thriving with an ongoing concern. Through choice, predilection, lack of education, impatience, or other causes, the entrepreneur lives, in a way, outside the mainstream.

We have to ask ourselves, 'What kind of world is it where a baby-food executive substitutes artificial flavoring and sugar for apple juice? What kind of businesses have we created when we even lie to infants?'

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.

Local companies don't have to internalize their costs, and few actually do, but they tend to more often because the owners live there and they have to show their face in town, and their kids play with other kids.

People are voluntarily giving money to A.E.I. - there is no government money - because they think the work we do is valuable.

I could have made a lot of money doing 'Golden Girls,' and I would have been good. But the image of it! And for me to work with Betty White every day would be like taking cyanide.

You can feel how much money goes into commercials by how swiftly they act on your mind. And they've got, like, a hypnotic quality to the way they present their products.

I think I get way too much credit for making what people consider to be smart choices, but it's only because I made a decision to stop worrying about making money. I had done network sitcoms. I had a nest egg.