Top 200 Dave Ramsey Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Good to Great by my friend Jim Collins.”

— Dave Ramsey

202. “Requiring nothing of a child gives them no opportunity for failure or success.”

— Dave Ramsey

203. “I finally realized that results are generated by activities. If I manage my activities then the results I want occur.”

— Dave Ramsey

204. “There is tremendous satisfaction in working your tail off to hit a goal, then winning. It is worth the work.”

— Dave Ramsey

205. “Goals convert vision into energy. When you lay out exactly what you want to do in detail, you immediately start feeling the room move and the earth shake. You are pulled into your new life like some scene from a movie. Goals help make great men. J. C. Penney once said, “Give me a stock clerk with a goal, and I will give you a man who will make history. Give me a man without a goal and I will give you a stock clerk.”

— Dave Ramsey

206. “Someone who never has fun with money misses the point. Someone who never invests money will never have any. Someone who never gives is a monkey with his hand in a bottle.”

— Dave Ramsey

207. “As long as the sun was shining, life was a party, and the pig with brick seemed kind of nerdy, or overly conservative, or even fanatical. But when their stupid theories were stress tested, their houses fell.”

— Dave Ramsey

208. “The fact is, most people in our nation today believe that debt is NORMAL, and in most cases, NECESSARY. They can’t imagine living a cash-and-carry life or a life in which all things they own are purchased outright with cash at the time of purchase – in other words, with no payment plan or use of credit cards.”

— Dave Ramsey

209. “We want it all, and we can borrow to get it all, before we can afford it all.”

— Dave Ramsey

210. “If you want to be skinny, study skinny people, and if you want to be rich, do what lots of rich people do, not what some mythsayer says to do.”

— Dave Ramsey

211. “We are scaling down” is a painful statement to make to friends or family.”

— Dave Ramsey

212. “Over the long term you get what you deserve, and none of us like it when what we deserve is pain.”

— Dave Ramsey

213. “Being the highly trained investment mogul that I am, I could certainly find places to put that money where it would earn more. Or would it? Remember, personal finance is personal. I have come to realize that Sharon’s peace of mind bought with the oversized emergency fund is a great return on investment. Guys, this can be a wonderful gift to your wife. An Emergency Fund Can.”

— Dave Ramsey

214. “Nothing was left to chance; every smell, every piece of furniture, and certainly the design of the floor plans made these model homes world-class.”

— Dave Ramsey

215. “The accountability of a group environment causes people to change their behaviors.”

— Dave Ramsey

216. “Businesses and entrepreneurs have become experts at microwaving rather than Crock-Potting their business plan. They are so worried about the moment, Q1 or Q2, that they lose their vision and their soul. They trade real, rich, abiding, deep success for the momentary win and then are constantly having to start over. Have a long-term vision and execute it. As the billionaire advised me, slow and steady wins the race.”

— Dave Ramsey

217. “Traction equals satisfaction.”

— Dave Ramsey

218. “La Rochefoucauld once said, “The most untutored person with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without.”

— Dave Ramsey

219. “No matter how blessed or distressed you are financially, your first priority every month is to cover what I call the Four Walls. Think of it as the four walls that hold your house together. They are food, shelter, clothing, and transportation. If you have food in your belly, a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and a way to get to work tomorrow, you’ll live to fight another day.”

— Dave Ramsey

220. “Financial Peace Jr.”

— Dave Ramsey

221. “Debt has been sold to us so aggressively, so loudly, and so often that to imagine living without debt requires myth-busting.”

— Dave Ramsey

222. “The other huge qualifier is that I used the principles I teach to personally build wealth. My wife and I have truly lived this book. The things we teach are not theory – they work!”

— Dave Ramsey

223. “To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, and be nothing.” I can’t help millions of people change their lives by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”

— Dave Ramsey

224. “If I loan money to a friend or relative, the relationship will be strained or destroyed. The only relationship that would be enhanced is the kind resulting from one party being the master and the other party a servant.”

— Dave Ramsey

225. “Only if you mix knowledge with attitude, character, perseverance, vision, diligence, and extreme levels of work will your college degree produce for you.”

— Dave Ramsey

226. “We don’t always like change, do we? Sometimes, we’re like a baby sitting in a poopy diaper. We think, Sure it stinks, but it’s warm and it’s mine! We get defensive of our mess even if it’s not working. So when I tell people the first thing they need to do is put $1,000 in the bank and not touch it, it can be a deal-breaker. It requires you to look in the mirror and say, “You’re the problem.” When you do that emotionally, you’ll start to win with money.”

— Dave Ramsey

227. “But the modern Pharisees don’t see it that way. Instead, these critics put on their $100 blue jeans, leave their nice homes, drive their SUVs to the trendy coffee shop down the street, pull out their $1,000 MacBooks, sip their $8 coffees, and type blog posts about how wealth is evil.”

— Dave Ramsey

228. “If we aren’t profitable by December 20, I will close the business.” That would leave him about $800,000, plus his retirement money and home, and he would do something else to earn a living.”

— Dave Ramsey

229. “Ninety percent of making the right decision is the gathering of information. The bigger the decision, the more time you take, the more options you gather, and the more informed you should become.”

— Dave Ramsey

230. “Henry Ford thought debt was a lazy man’s method to purchase items, and his philosophy was so ingrained in Ford Motor Company that Ford didn’t offer financing until ten years after General Motors did. Now, of course, Ford Motor Credit is one of the most profitable of Ford Motor’s operations. The old school saw the folly of debt; the new school saw the opportunity to take advantage of the consumer with debt.”

— Dave Ramsey

231. “Parents, you need to understand something: someone is going to teach your kids about money. It will either be you, or it will be a shady car dealer, a credit card pusher on your child’s first day at college, a get-rich-quick infomercial pitchman, or just some clown who’s after their money. If you want to protect your kids, you need to send them out into the world with some knowledge.”

— Dave Ramsey

232. “Author and counselor Dennis Rainey of FamilyLife explains that women are traditionally more verbal than men. I’ve heard him say men usually speak about 10,000–20,000 words a day, while women speak 30,000–50,000 words per day – with gusts up to 125,000! That’s why a lot of guys come home from a busy day at work, hit the sofa, and don’t say a word. They can’t. They’ve already used up their quota.”

— Dave Ramsey

233. “Just as slaves born into slavery can’t visualize freedom, we Americans don’t know what it would be like to wake up to no debt.”

— Dave Ramsey

234. “Business is really not that hard. You are, however, required to do the basics or you will not win.”

— Dave Ramsey

235. “Dreaming also has a negative connotation as well. Some people dream and stop there. They never do anything about making their dreams come true.”

— Dave Ramsey

236. “Normal in America is broke. So if you do normal behaviors, you will be broke, and if your kids are financially normal, they will be broke.”

— Dave Ramsey

237. “If you have a customer who is able to make the purchase, they trust you, and you have shown them the benefits of the purchase, they will close themselves; you do not need some arm-twisting technique.”

— Dave Ramsey

238. “Repetition, volume, and longevity will twist and turn a myth, a lie, into a commonly accepted way of doing things.”

— Dave Ramsey

239. “In our National Study of Millionaires, we found that 67% have a paid-off home, and it took them an average of 11.2 years to pay it off. Take that in for a moment: Millionaires don’t spend thirty years paying off their house. They pay it off in roughly ten years. They’re also not living in a 10,000 square foot mansion. They live, on average, in a 2,600 square foot home they’ve been in an average of seventeen years.”

— Dave Ramsey

240. “Foundations in Personal Finance.”

— Dave Ramsey

241. “Zig Ziglar says, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” I love how Zig cuts right to the heart of the matter. If you don’t have a target, if you don’t have a goal in mind, then you’ll never get where you want to go. Most people take a “Ready-Fire-Aim” approach to budgeting. They get the money, spend the money, and then wonder why they don’t have any money. It’s crazy!”

— Dave Ramsey

242. “We enjoy earning interest now, rather than paying it.”

— Dave Ramsey

243. “Millionaires own a paid for home and maybe a beach condo. Millionaires probably live just down the block from you in a normal residential neighborhood. Millionaires often still cut their own grass.”

— Dave Ramsey