David Boies Quotes

If you're a doctor or a lawyer or teacher, if you only get three things right out of 10, you're considered a failure.

The driving force of any profession includes not only the special knowledge, skills and standards that it demands, but the duty to serve responsibly, selflessly and wisely, and to establish an inherently ethical relationship between professionals and society.

A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.

I've never made any horrible, horrible movies. If you don't ruin your reputation, you can always get work.

We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

You wouldn't go to a hospital, you wouldn't go to a law firm where the doctors and lawyers were not retained on merit: where they all had tenure regardless of competence. Parents feel the same way about schools that they send their children to.

If somebody were more passionate about Redfin, how would she not be more qualified to have my job than I am? Like, that's the thing I have to be the best at.

I had many opportunities to get behind products in the past, and I was always careful to evaluate all of them. I will not put my name to shoddy items.

You want to do your job well so that people in the future say, 'OK, he's not bad, let's hire him.'

Everyone in the United States asks me about being a woman CEO. To be honest, it has had no impact on my career. While I was at BCG, it didn't matter whether you were a man or a woman. The only thing that mattered was that you were good at your job.

You don't need to know someone personally to be able to discern whether their work is high quality or not. The idea of a meritocracy is that it's what they do, not who they are.

It's not communism, it's shouldn't be that everybody gets a try no matter how good or bad they are. It's our profession and our art, so we should eventually strive to be working with the best people.

First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.

I never wanted to look back on my career and be embarrassed about work that I chose to do.

When it comes to work, there is a fear factor around meritocracy. People are afraid of being openly judged. However, when you know what you are being measured against, it's empowering.

You can't do things for money. You just can't act them. There's gotta be something about the script that you really want to do. I wouldn't do a job if I didn't think I could do the best work I possibly could.

If the board of trustees have the manliness to dismiss me for cause, and declare the cause, I prefer that they should do it. No power on earth could persuade me to resign.

I wouldn't put out anything that I didn't want to ride to.

Sure, just like there are bad lawyers, bad doctors and bad politicians, there are people who aren't cut out to be teachers. But by and large, the people who are called to be teachers are passionate about the profession.

I think, at the end of the day, you should just be judged by your work, not on what effect it might have on the world or your community.

Once you stop thinking about the minutiae of what each part might mean for your career, you learn that if you do a good performance, it's going to be good for you. The work is what matters.

I'm not exactly in a position where I get to be super-picky about the roles I get. But I would also never want to be a part of something that I think is poor in taste or doesn't align with what I believe in.

'Competent counsel' ought to require more than a human being with a law license and a pulse.

I've made movies where I was not happy, and I'd rather not work for a year than do a bad film. It takes a long time for me to recuperate when I do that.

I could heartily wish that every commission officer was to be previously examined; for, to my certain knowledge, there are persons who have already crept into commission without abilities or fit qualification: I am myself far from desiring to be excused.