Price Pritchett Quotes

Trust is the glue that holds relationships together.

If you’re experiencing no anxiety or discomfort, the risk you’re taking probably isn’t worthy of you. The only risks that aren’t a little scary are the ones you’ve outgrown.

Your ethical muscle grows stronger every time you choose right over wrong.

The question is, when so many others cut corners, shave the truth, self-deal, believe in the fast buck, and follow the crowd along the low road of least resistance, can we even afford to travel the high road of ethical behavior? Frankly, we can’t afford anything else. Any other competitive angle is a pure crapshoot in today’s business world. Companies with shaky ethics and shabby standards will be crippled as they try to compete in our changing world.

Ethical dilemmas have a way of sneaking up on a person. If something smells funny, stay away from it. Or help get rid of it.

Live according to the ethics of excellence, and you can always stand proud. Pride – not vanity, but dignity and self-respect – should carry a lot of weight in helping you make decisions. Let pride help you decide.

Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities.

High personal standards aren’t enough for organizational excellence. You’ve got to be intolerant of low standards in others. . . . If you accommodate questionable practices in others who touch your organization, you risk soiling its reputation. Anybody whose hands aren’t clean can get the place dirty.

How can we be trusted with big things if we’re not trustworthy with things that are small? Don’t allow your finer instincts to become a casualty of the little everyday crimes of ethical compromise.

We all faced painful ethical challenges before we even knew how to spell our names. There were tough choices. Tradeoffs. Confusing signals regarding how to live one’s life. And here we are now, today, still struggling. Still trying to sort things out. Still trying to work our way through life effectively. About the only thing that has changed is the scope of the problem. There’s more at stake now. And we’re in a position, as grownups, to do a lot more-good or bad-for ourselves, our organization, our world. But we still must wrestle with our imperfect ethics.

You can’t bake a cake without getting the kitchen messy. Halfway through surgery it looks like there’s been a murder in the operating room. If you send a rocket to the moon, about ninety percent of the time it’s off course—it ‘fails’ its way to the moon by continually making mistakes and correcting them.

Optimism inspires, energizes, and brings out our best. It points the mind toward possibilities and helps us think creatively past problems.