Top 40 Michael D. Eisner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Fear of failure is a far worse condition than failure itself, because it kills off possibilities.”

— Michael D. Eisner

2. “Diversity is a great force towards creativity.”

— Michael D. Eisner

3. “Management is not a science, it is an art.”

— Michael D. Eisner

4. “Balanced emotions are crucial to intuitive decision making.”

— Michael D. Eisner

5. “A brand is a living entity-and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.”

— Michael D. Eisner

6. “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”

— Michael D. Eisner

7. “We all know that the Disney brand is our most valuable asset. It is the sum total of our seventy-five years in business, of our reputation, of everything that we stand for.”

— Michael D. Eisner

8. “It is rare to find a business partner who is selfless. If you are lucky it happens once in a lifetime.”

— Michael D. Eisner

9. “Failure is good as long as it does not become a habit.”

— Michael D. Eisner

10. “There’s a fine line between what would characterize you as a troglodyte and what would characterize you as a brilliant, avant-garde, forward-thinking genius. There’s some middle ground.”

— Michael D. Eisner

11. “A decision will be made before it’s too late or soon thereafter.”

— Michael D. Eisner

12. “Recovering from failure is often easier than building from success.”

— Michael D. Eisner

13. “If it’s not growing, it’s going to die.”

— Michael D. Eisner

14. “Succeeding is not really a life experience that does that much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience.”

— Michael D. Eisner

15. “User-generated content is not done by professionals. The best user-generated content eventually becomes those people gravitated in the professional world.”

— Michael D. Eisner

16. “You either play by the rules, change the rules, or get out, altogether.”

— Michael D. Eisner

17. “There’s no good idea that cannot be improved on.”

— Michael D. Eisner

18. “Sometimes you have to be worn out and burnt out to become authentic and original.”

— Michael D. Eisner

19. “Creativity can flourish within sensible financial limitations.”

— Michael D. Eisner

20. “It doesn’t matter whether it comes in by cable, telephone lines, computor, or satellite. Everyone’s going to have to deal with Disney.”

— Michael D. Eisner

21. “To punish failure is yet another way to encourage mediocrity.”

— Michael D. Eisner

22. “I find that no matter how long a meeting goes on, the best ideas always come during the final five minutes, when people drop their guard and I ask them what they really think.”

— Michael D. Eisner

23. “The movie business has always been like the wild-catting oil business. Everyone wants a gusher.”

— Michael D. Eisner

24. “The company should be run from a creative point of view rather than a financial point of view.”

— Michael D. Eisner

25. “In every business, in every industry, management does matter.”

— Michael D. Eisner

26. “You can’t succeed unless you’ve got failure, especially creatively.”

— Michael D. Eisner

27. “Doing stuff that I don’t have to talk about because I’m not in a public company is fantastic.”

— Michael D. Eisner

28. “I always went into an area that was in last place, with a philosophy, ‘You can’t fall off the floor.’ And I was lucky, was at the right time and the right place, with the right ideas, and each one of these areas became number one.”

— Michael D. Eisner

29. “Eventually the consumer will come to appreciate the editorial point of view of every different brand. User-generated content without editorial oversight will simply be background noise.”

— Michael D. Eisner

30. “When I read biographies, I’m only interested in the first few chapters. I’m not interested in when people become successful. I’m interested in what made them successful.”

— Michael D. Eisner

31. “Graduate school is a place to hide for a couple of years.”

— Michael D. Eisner

32. “Privacy laws are our biggest impediment to us obtaining our objectives.”

— Michael D. Eisner

33. “The odds of being successful are the same for every group that is educated in America. It’s just that the group that is not wealthy is 95 percent of the population. So if there are 100 successful people in a room, probably 95 out of 100 came from more modest means.”

— Michael D. Eisner

34. “The whole business starts with ideas, and we’re convinced that ideas come out of an environment of supportive conflict, which is synonymous with appropriate friction.”

— Michael D. Eisner

35. “Well, when you’re trying to create things that are new, you have to be prepared to be on the edge of risk.”

— Michael D. Eisner

36. “My strength is coming up with two outs in the last of the ninth.”

— Michael D. Eisner

37. “I think when you get inured with the past, you get committed to the past, you stop growing.”

— Michael D. Eisner

38. “Content has always driven the business. Now it’s no longer the queen to a king of distribution; it is the king, king, king, because the consumer has complete choice.”

— Michael D. Eisner

39. “We cannot escape that Hollywood is in the middle of a wave of technological change. The current angst over all the implications of new entertainment technology is nothing new.”

— Michael D. Eisner

40. “I’m not sure I was a typical head of a company. Most people that run big companies come out of sales and they come out of marketing and they’re quite serious and they have MBA’s from very good schools and things like that. I’m an accidental CEO, thank the Disney Company.”

— Michael D. Eisner

41. “Many people you think are individual achievers in fact have either a strong spousal partner over many years or a business partner who’s either in the background, not given enough publicity or less egocentric.”

— Michael D. Eisner

Featured in: Strong Quotes

42. “My best idea was to not accept my wife’s negative reaction when I asked her to marry me.”

— Michael D. Eisner

43. “I find that, once you get into a position where you can afford a pair of shoes and a decent level of living, success in itself is empty.”

— Michael D. Eisner

44. “You just have to make sure the model you’re working on does not undersell your product.”

— Michael D. Eisner

45. “Television is very much like the motion picture; you need high-end product that will first go on broadcast or cable and eventually on the Internet, and then the lifespan of this content being distributed worldwide.”

— Michael D. Eisner

46. “I gravitate toward the team thing. I’m not a golfer – I much prefer basketball.”

— Michael D. Eisner

47. “21 years as CEO is a long time. I was and probably still am the longest serving CEO in America. Certainly I am in the media industry, bar none.”

— Michael D. Eisner

48. “I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. I went to an Episcopal high school. I went to a Baptist college. I’ve taken every comparative-religion course that was available. God? I have no idea.”

— Michael D. Eisner