Harry Gordon Selfridge

"The merchant sends the buyer far afield with instructions to invest... in... staples or novelties, as he thinks will interest the home public. He risks his money and a certain amount of prestige upon …"

"hundred years ago the selling of goods at retail had settled into a system of small shops, each confining itself to a particular class of merchandise. The comprehensive trade of the sixteenth century …"

"Imagination must be drawn upon, risks must be assumed. "Nothing venture, nothing have" is perhaps truer of the department store than of any other enterprise."

"This ability... to organize, to breathe into others that fire of enthusiasm, that quality of judgment, that spirit of progress, has long been considered by thinking men of commerce as the final and gr…"

"The last hundred years have shown... that one man cannot do it all, and that anyone who attempts to hold within his two hands all the threads of a great business of the present day fails to achieve th…"

"To write on Commerce or Trade and do the subject justice would require more volumes than any library could hold, and involve more detail than any mind could grasp. It would be a history in extenso of …"

"Commerce is the mother of the arts, the sciences, the professions, and in this twentieth century has itself become an art, a science, a profession."

"Bigness alone is nothing, but bigness filled with the activity that does everything continually better means much."