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Staff post about: Ray Kroc Become an Author

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

I put the hamburger on the assembly line.

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

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

We're not in the hamburger business. We're in show business.

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.

Dear Walt, I feel somewhat presumptuous addressing you in this way. Yet I am sure you would not want me to address you any other way…I have very recently taken over the national franchise of the McDonald’s system. I would like to inquire if there may be an opportunity for a McDonald’s in your Disneyland Development.

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.

All money means to me is a pride in accomplishment.

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

When I saw it working that day in 1954, I felt like some latter-day Newton who’d just had an Idaho potato caromed off his skull. That night in my motel room I did a lot of heavy thinking about what I’d seen during the day. 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.

I considered myself a connoisseur of kitchens. I prided myself on being able to tell which operations would appeal to the public and which would fail.

When you’re green, you’re growing. When you’re ripe, you rot. Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?

None of us is as good as all of us.

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.

The success of additions such as the Filet-o-Fish, the Big Mac, Hot Apple Pie and Egg McMuffin…each evolved from an idea of one of our operators. So the company has benefited from the ingenuity of its small businessmen.

I believe in God, family, and McDonald's. And in the office, that order is reversed.

I didn’t invent the hamburger. I just took it more seriously than anyone else...We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.

It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun. Yet, is it any more unusual to find grace in the texture and softly curved silhouette of a bun than to reflect lovingly on the hackles of a favourite fishing fly? Or the arrangement of textures and colours in a butterfly's wing? Not if you're a McDonald's man. Not if you view the bun as an essential material in the art of serving a great many meals fast.

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

If any of my competitors were drowning, I'd stick a hose in their mouth and turn on the water. It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way – of survival of the fittest.

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 that the best was ahead of me.

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.

If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.

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.

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.

We provide food that customers love, day after day after day. People just want more of it.

Sometimes Ed MacLuckie would have forgotten to turn the sign on when dusk began to fall, and that made me furious. Or maybe the lot would have some litter on it that Ed said he hadn't had time to pick up. Those little things didn't seem to bother some people, but they were gross affronts to me. I'd get screaming mad.

Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.

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