Encylopedia Salesmen Quotes

Encyclopedia-selling was known to be the last resort of the feckless, the inept, and the desperate ~ Margaret Atwood

She had once been the belle of her circle of small tradesmen and salesmen, but now her little pig eyes with their swollen lids could scarcely open. ~ Boris Pasternak

Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence ... If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity ... Let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists.' ~ John Rawlings Rees

It is upsetting to many parents that their teen-agers introduce them to their friends as encyclopedia salesmen who are just passing through ... if they introduce them at all. I have some acquaintances who hover in dark parking lots, enter church separately and crouch in furnace rooms so their teen-agers will not be accused of having parents. ~ Erma Bombeck

We are all salesmen every day of our lives. We are selling our ideas, our plans, our enthusiasms to those with whom we come in contact. ~ Charles R. Schwab

The salesmen bought me perfume and invited me to lunch. But they couldn't talk to me about why families of guajiros slept in the city's parks under flashing Coca-Cola signs. Those men only murmured sweet nonsense to me, trying in vain to flatter me. ~ Cristina Garcia

Happy salesmen not only multiply their volume of business and their income, they also multiply themselves. ~ Walter Russell

When Americans are asked to rank professions in terms of honesty and ethics, insurance agents routinely end up near the bottom of the list - somewhere between politicians and car salesmen. Generally, insurers are seen as clever hucksters who prey on insecurity and ignorance to sell people what they don't need at prices they shouldn't have to pay. ~ James Surowiecki

Timid salesmen have skinny kids. ~ Zig Ziglar

He'd worked for his bread, been hounded, hounded and oppressed by people and by necessity, just like everyone else. He'd worked nights; in Amsterdam he came home from the office at one or two in the morning, then sat up, brooded, scribbled, written whole novels and burned them.
What could he do? What did they accomplish with all that? . . . The world was still turning, turning exactly the way it always had, and it would keep on turning without him. He let it get to him. Now he was more sensible. He washed his hands of it. There were enough salesmen and writers and talkers and people who let it get to them - more than enough.
And they were always afraid of something and sad about something. Always scared to be late somewhere or get a scolding from someone, or they couldn't make ends meet, or the toilet was stopped up, or they had an ulcer or their Sunday suit was starting to wear thin, or the rent was due; they couldn't do this because of that and couldn't possibly do that because of this. When he was young he was never that stupid. ~ Nescio

You must learn how to handle rejection. To succeed, you must learn how to cope with a little word 'no', learn how to strip that rejection of all its power. The best salesmen are those who are rejected most. They are the ones who can take any 'no' and use it as a prod to go onto the next 'yes'. ~ Tony Robbins

Trust is weird," my mother said. "People give it too easily, most of the time. Because somebody is attractive, they expect him to be good or honest. Or like pushy salesmen - somebody who carefully makes you feel like you're emotionally obligated to trust them. Like you're the rude one if you don't. Trust is really something that needs to be earned. Hard earned. If somebody every says, 'Don't you trust me?' Just say, "No, as a matter of fact. ~ Kristen D. Randle

I've always felt that a lot of modern art is a con, and that the most successful painters are often better salesmen and promoters than they are artists. ~ Donald J. Trump

Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that can't wait to try out their new experiment. They are the maestros of the symphony that plays in their head, conducting what happens, where, and at what precise moment. They are engineers and architects that design the structure of their piece so it stands the test of time and continues to fire on all cylinders. They play mechanics and doctors in their revisions, hoping they prescribe the correct diagnosis to fix the piece's 'boo boos'. They are salesmen who pitch not an idea or a product, but themselves, to editors, publishers, and more importantly, their readers. They are teachers who through their craft, preach to pupils about what works and what doesn't work and why. Writers can make you feel, can make you think, can make you wonder, but they can also grab your hand and guide you through their maze. Similar to what Emerson stated in 'The Poet,' writers possess a unique view on life, and with their revolving eye, they attempt to encompass all. I am a writer. ~ Garrett Dennert

Here is revelation bright as the evening star: Jesus comes for sinners, for those as outcast as tax collectors and for those caught up in squalid choices and failed dreams. He comes for corporate executives, street people, superstars, farmers, hookers, addicts, IRS agents, AIDS victims, and even used-car salesmen. Jesus not only talks with these people but dines with them - fully aware that His table fellowship with sinners will raise the eyebrows of religious bureaucrats who hold up the robes and insignia of their authority to justify their condemnation of the truth and their rejection of the gospel of grace. ~ Brennan Manning

My hosts have spread the spectrum: students, farm and construction workers, salesmen and truck drivers, teaches and writers... I've stayed in homes with backyard swimming pools and homes with backyard toilets, ridden with people who needed gas money and others who bought me meals, some who would put the fear of God into me, who whose country-twand talk almost called for an interpreter... but one thing had they in common: the willingness to help a stranger on the road or a weary friend at their door ~ Irv Thomas

My name is Koshka, and this Human person is Jazz. She is the protégé of the Baba Yaga Bella, and I am Bella's Chudo-Yudo."
"Oh," said the Dwarf, and doffed his hat, briefly revealing a shiny bald spot before putting it back on again. "Why didn't you say so?" He scowled. "I thought you were door-to-door salesmen."
"Do you get a lot of that in the Otherworld?" Jazz asked, genuinely interested in the answer. Somehow she hadn't imagined that would be a problem here.
Smythe shook his head. "Not yet. But I've heard all about them, and I expect they'll turn up any day. ~ Deborah Blake

No one tells salesmen what they can and can't do. ~ Barbara Corcoran

He will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the office of salesmen. In well-ordered states they are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other purpose; ~ Plato

However, more important to all of that: the players played the game as a true team. There are many teams in baseball, but not all play as a team. Many merely play as a group of talented athletes, which is a huge difference over the course of a long season. ~ Michael Delaware

Perhaps it is a testament to the power of modern marketing savvy that an obese man with heart disease and high blood pressure became one of the richest snake oil salesmen ever to live, selling a diet that promises to help you lose weight, to keep your heart healthy and to normalize your blood pressure. ~ T. Colin Campbell

I am a Christian - but sometimes I feel very removed from Christianity. The Jesus Christ that I believe in was the man who turned over the tables in the temple and threw the money-changers out - substitute T.V. evangelists if you like ... why in the West, do we spend so much money on extending the arms race instead of wiping out malaria, which could be eradicated given ten minutes worth of the world's arm budget? To me, we are living in the most un-Christian times. When I see these racketeers, the snake-oil salesmen on these right-winged television stations, asking for not your $20.00, or your $50.00, but your $100.00 in the name of Jesus Christ, I just want to throw up!! ~ Bono

If I can make you feel the same way that I feel about my
product or service we'll have a meaningful conversation about it
and how it can help. The trouble is that most sales people don't feel
anything. Nothing at all ~ Chris Murray

gymnasts retire at 20, cricketers at 34, actresses at 32, actors at 75, salesmen at 50, other employees at 58 or 60 years, and doctors and lawyers when their bodies do not listen to their minds. Of course, one class beats them all - politicians retire at 90! ~ P.V. Subramanyam

You cannot win everyday, but make sure u win, at-least once in a while. ~ Honeya

I knew salesmen, they made good murderers. ~ Iain Pears

Quiet demonstrates just how deep and disturbing is this plague of extroverts - the showoffs, risk-takers, salesmen, charmers, charlatans and politicians." - New York Post ~ Susan Cain

Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment." If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn't get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked - until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones - until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. "Well, you can say, 'Everybody knows that,'" said Munger. "I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther." Munger's ~ Michael Lewis

All politicians are to some extent salesmen. ~ George Will

He slid back again into his earlier position. "This getting up early," he thought, "makes a man quite idiotic. A man must have his sleep. Other travelling salesmen live like harem women. For instance, when I come back to the inn during the course of the morning to write up the necessary orders, these gentlemen are just sitting down to breakfast. If I were to try that with my boss, I'd be thrown out on the spot. Still, who knows whether that mightn't be really good for me? If I didn't hold back for my parents' sake, I'd have quit ages ago. I would've gone to the boss and told him just what I think from the bottom of my heart. He would've fallen right off his desk! How weird it is to sit up at that desk and talk down to the employee from way up there. The boss has trouble hearing, so the employee has to step up quite close to him. Anyway, I haven't completely given up that hope yet. Once I've got together the money to pay off my parents' debt to him - that should take another five or six years - I'll do it for sure. Then I'll make the big break. In any case, right now I have to get up. My train leaves at five o'clock ~ Franz Kafka

In London, almost all Jewish shops in the Whitechapel district were displaying placards denying entry to German salesmen and affirming their anti-Nazi boycott. Teenagers patrolled the streets distributing handbills asking shoppers to boycott German goods ... ~ Edwin Black

My whole family can talk. They are all car salesmen. They are all funny. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

An emphasis on reading individual texts with a view to understanding the ideological visions of the world that underlie them has also had a dramatic impact. This type of interpretation requires historians to treat ancient authors, not as sources of fact, but rather like second-hand-car salesmen whom they would do well to approach with a healthy caution. ~ Peter Heather

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths. ~ Sinclair Lewis