Top 70 Ray Kroc Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Luck is the dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.”

— Ray Kroc

Featured in: Motivational Quotes

2. “The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.”

— Ray Kroc

Featured in: Leadership Quotes

3. “None of Us is as Good as All of Us.”

— Ray Kroc

4. “Look after the customer and the business will take care of itself.”

— Ray Kroc

5. “If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.”

— Ray Kroc

6. “To be successful, you must be daring, be first and be different.”

— Ray Kroc

7. “If my competitor were drowning I’d stick a hose in his mouth and turn on the water.”

— Ray Kroc

8. “As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot.”

— Ray Kroc

9. “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.”

— Ray Kroc

10. “The more I help others to succeed, the more I succeed.”

— Ray Kroc

11. “There’s almost nothing you can’t accomplish if you set your mind to it.”

— Ray Kroc

12. “In business for yourself, but not by yourself.”

— Ray Kroc

13. “I was an overnight success all right, but 30 years is a long, long night.”

— Ray Kroc

14. “There are things money can’t buy and hard work can’t win. One of them is happiness.”

— Ray Kroc

15. “You’re only as good as the people you hire.”

— Ray Kroc

16. “If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.”

— Ray Kroc

17. “If you believe in it, and you believe in it hard, it is impossible to fail.”

— Ray Kroc

18. “The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.”

— Ray Kroc

19. “The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way.”

— Ray Kroc

20. “It’s easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor.”

— Ray Kroc

21. “No one of us is more important than the rest of us.”

— Ray Kroc

22. “Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.”

— Ray Kroc

23. “Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a byproduct – a byproduct of achievement.”

— Ray Kroc

24. “We have an obligation to give something back to the community that gives so much to us.”

— Ray Kroc

25. “Take calculated risks. Act boldly and thoughtfully. Be an agile company.”

— Ray Kroc

26. “You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well.”

— Ray Kroc

27. “This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ’em, and I’m going to kill ’em before they kill me. Speaking of competition in the fast-food industry.”

— Ray Kroc

28. “There is absolutely nothing special about walking on a rope stretched along the ground. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in a deed accomplished, and therefore no happiness.”

— Ray Kroc

29. “McDonald’s is a people business, and that smile on that counter girl’s face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image.”

— Ray Kroc

30. “Perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald’s. Everything else was secondary for me.”

— Ray Kroc

31. “If I had a brick for every time I’ve repeated the phrase Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value, I think I’d probably be able to bridge the Atlantic Ocean with them.”

— Ray Kroc

32. “Our aim was to insure repeat business based on the system’s reputation rather than on the quality of a single store or operator.”

— Ray Kroc

33. “I HAVE ALWAYS believed that each man makes his own happiness and is responsible for his own problems.”

— Ray Kroc

34. “The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”

— Ray Kroc

35. “Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?”

— Ray Kroc

36. “No self-respecting pitcher throws the same way to every batter and no self-respecting salesman makes the same pitch to every client.”

— Ray Kroc

37. “Luck is a dividend of sweat.”

— Ray Kroc

38. “It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor.”

— Ray Kroc

39. “If you do it first class and you don’t compromise values, and you don’t compromise quality, and you don’t compromise service, and you don’t compromise cleanliness, then everybody else who is the competitor has got to play catch-up.”

— Ray Kroc

40. “The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.”

— Ray Kroc

41. “I like to get people fired up, fill them with zeal for McDonald’s, and watch the results in their work.”

— Ray Kroc

42. “While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.”

— Ray Kroc

43. “The french fry is my canvas.”

— Ray Kroc

44. “All money means to me is a pride in accomplishment.”

— Ray Kroc

45. “I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I’d imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.”

— Ray Kroc

46. “The McDonald brothers were simply not on my wavelength at all. I was obsessed with the idea of making McDonald’s the biggest and the best. They were content with what they had; they didn’t want to be bothered with more risks and more demands.”

— Ray Kroc

47. “I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced the best was ahead of me.”

— Ray Kroc

48. “I never considered my dreams wasted energy; they were invariably linked to some form of action. When I dreamed about having a lemonade stand, for example, it wasn’t long before I set up a lemonade stand.”

— Ray Kroc

49. “I put the hamburger on the assembly line.”

— Ray Kroc

50. “Visions of McDonald’s restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain. I don’t believe in saturation. We’re thinking and talking worldwide.”

— Ray Kroc