Leonard Lauder

“You can't separate a house from a family. It's a living, breathing home.”

“I'd rather be a big fish in a specialized pond than a little, little fish in a more generalized big pond.”

“Every morning, I eat one fat-free yogurt with a sliced peach when peaches are in season, and one thin slice of whole-wheat bread. The same thing. I don't want to get fat. And I want to keep my fitness.”

“No one stopped buying I.B.M. because Tom Watson wasn't there, but they stopped buying Elizabeth Arden because she wasn't there.”

“The best advice I ever got came from my mother, Estee Lauder: She believed that if you had something good to say, you should put it in writing. But if you had something bad to say, you should tell the person to his or her face.”

“I think a cosmetics company should be headed by a woman.”

“I love that works of art are printed so that anyone can buy them. The variety of what they put on little postcards astounds me.”

“I love rumors. It gives me something to think about and enjoy.”

“When you live in the shadow of a big tree, you have to run twice as fast to get into the sunlight.”

“I'm not a builder of buildings, I'm a builder of collections.”

“I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.”

“One person really can make a difference.”

“A visionary is someone who can see the future, or thinks he sees the future. In my case, I use it and it comes out right. That doesn't come from daydreams or dreams, but it comes from knowing the market and knowing the world and knowing people really well and knowing where they're going to be tomorrow.”

“My mother always used to say when picking up a product, 'Would you give this to the Duchess of Windsor?' Well, that's lovely. But the Duchess of Windsor is dead.”

“To be a great leader, you firstly have to like people. If you don't like people, at the end of the day they will figure this out and you can't lead them too well.”

“If tomorrow all of America were to become paternalistic, we would beat the Japanese every day of the week. I think that the concept of accusing someone of running a paternalistic company, that's not an accusation. One should compliment someone on that.”

“If I don't learn something every single day, it's a wasted day.”