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

Charles Koch

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Charles Koch
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: November 1
Businessman
Businessperson
Wichita
Kansas
Charles G. Koch
Charles de Ganahl Koch
Challenges
Values
Trying
Good
Challenged
People
Hire
Basically
Humility
Challenge

More quotes by Charles Koch

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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.
Charles Koch
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I'd like to see a rebirth of America - go back where there's equal rights for everybody and that people succeed to the extent that they help other people improve their lives. To lead toward a society that maximizes peace, civility, and well-being for everyone.
Charles Koch
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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.
Charles Koch
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If you never failed, then you're probably not doing very much.
Charles Koch
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If somebody is doing more and more to make other people's lives better, have them make all they can, if that's what drives them, because that's what we want.
Charles Koch
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The good and the bad news is that politicians rarely do what they say they are going to do when they campaign.
Charles Koch
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First word [of my father] when I arrived [as a CEO] is, 'Son, i hope your first deal is a loser, otherwise, you'll think you're a lot smarter than you are.' But he had tremendous values, tremendous integrity, humility, work ethic and terrific thirst for knowledge.
Charles Koch
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I think this is so important - what's not done well at education at every level - is helping kids find, as I discovered for myself, what I was good at. I was very lucky to find out that at an early age, which set my direction in life.
Charles Koch
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A market system is not a profit system, it's a profit-and-loss system.
Charles Koch
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How do we make people's lives better unless we find the truth of what works and what doesn't?
Charles Koch
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I get a lot of death threats. But the way I look at it, I feel I have a moral obligation to do the best I can to make the country better for everybody, and that threatens certain people because they're going to have much less power. I want the power to go back to people making decisions over their own lives rather than some experts making it.
Charles Koch
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Success is one of the worst enemies of success, because success tends to breed complacency and lack of humility.
Charles Koch
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You can't start taking away benefits if people don't have any opportunities.
Charles Koch
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Just keep trying things, without really understanding the underlying fibers of well-being, or peace or civility, then you're just going to stumble from one disaster to another.
Charles Koch
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The problem is, to have prices fall would work fine if we didn't have all these built in rigidities on downward prices, because then things don't adjust, and that's how we have recessions and depressions, is prices and costs don't adjust together and they get out of whack, and we end up with dislocations.
Charles Koch
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They say your genetics are going to set your direction regardless of what happens, but I think there's more to it than that.
Charles Koch
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Most power is power to coerce somebody. We don't have the power to coerce anybody.
Charles Koch
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In America, I think we just keep adding, and that's our problem. We almost never subtract. We keep adding these boondoggles, and these violations of the basic principles of equal rights - certain people have more rights than others - it's like Animal Farm. The pig says that we all have equal rights, but some have more rights than others.
Charles Koch
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The reason we tend to support Republicans is they're taking us toward the cliff at only 70 miles per hour miles an hour and the Democrats are taking us 100 miles an hour.
Charles Koch
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We find that when we make an acquisition, or we have a hiring experience, that's one of the hardest things to change. If you've been working for a company where you didn't dare challenge your boss, or what's politically correct in the company, then it affects your career.
Charles Koch