Top 30 Philip Green Quotes

It is about attention to detail and then the minutest detail on top of that. I am an owner, and yet I’ll argue about the sign on the wall.

I am a positive thinker. You have to have this positive energy to get somewhere.

On what possible basis would I want to stop someone from buying BHS if I had tried to save it?

I am brave, but I take a view. It is an educated view. I am careful. I am not reckless.

I don’t think there’s anyone who can be unaware of the relevance of Kate Moss, the effect that she’s had on the fashion industry.

I could spend my life having meetings, a meeting to have another meeting, a hundred meetings to have another thousand meetings. It’s not what I’m about. I don’t want to have to get in a queue; that’s not how I like to live.

I used to leave my house at 6:30 in the morning, and I would visit 10 shops every Saturday, starting at the furthest shop I’d decided to go to that day, ending up in Oxford Street 12 hours later.

I’m in the retail business, not the circus business.

When I’ve had a talk with someone, I like them to leave unconfused. No need for contention.

When I am driving my car down the street, I try not to go down the potholes.

I was never going to be a scholar.

It’s all about quality of life and finding a happy balance between work and friends and family.

I think I’ve got a good feel. A feel for… being able to walk with different people. Or for being able to look at people and think, ‘Yeah, I might know what they want to wear.’

Good, bad or indifferent, if you are not investing in new technology, you are going to be left behind.

I hope and believe all the people that worked very closely with me at BHS for all those years, and some for the whole journey, will know it was never my intention for the business to have the ending it did.

I think everybody, from every end of the market place, from young through to old, wants to be fashionable. Everybody. Women want to feel like they’re wearing the right merchandise, regardless of age. They want to be trendy.

I sometimes think less is more. If you cut yourself in too many places, it is hard to execute.

If I say I’m going to do something, I do it.

They already know all about brands… but what 16- and 17-year-olds won’t necessarily have is experience of the world of work. The more that businesses get involved with schools, the better, because businesses sometimes complain that students don’t have what they require to succeed in work.

People are always going to go shopping. A lot of our effort is just: ‘How do we make the retail experience a great one?’

I have a very clear conscience.

Nobody can be a clairvoyant.

You’re going to find England, unfortunately, is a place where you get a lot of jealous, envious, you know, negative people. That’s how it is.

I don’t regret anything I haven’t done.

I don’t like department stores. I had a chain of department stores back in 1994 which was Lewis’s and Owen Owen, only for a short time, and I found department stores personally difficult.

You are forced to have the best data capture, the best information, when you have goods in hundreds of factories around the world, and the question is: ‘Where is everything?’ And how do you bring it all together?

I could have closed down bits of British Home Stores to make more money but it’s not my style. I want to make my money as a retailer, not by putting people out of work.

It’s not my style to blame anybody else.

I think I pick more winners than losers.

Arcadia was a typical venture capital deal, but I’m the adventurer and the capitalist.