These incentive quotes will inspire you. Incentive is something that encourages a person to do something or to work harder or a payment or concession to stimulate greater output or investment.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging incentive quotes, incentive sayings, and incentive proverbs.
Best Incentive Quotes
- “An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation” ~ Steven Levitt
- “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome” ~ Charlie Munger
- “There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.” ~ Orison Swett Marden
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“Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder.” ~ Nikita Khrushchev
- “Without change, there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.” ~ William Pollard
- “If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.” ~ Steven Johnson
- “The basic idea that incentives can be used to motivate behavior is a powerful one. It works for employees, and it has a clear place in parenting, as anyone who has tried to potty-train a recalcitrant toddler with sticker rewards knows.” ~ Emily Oster , Incentive quotes for employees
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“Incentives are not strategy, they are tactics. Defensive measures.” ~ Carlos Ghosn
- “Every company, every boardroom in which I sit, has a plan, and they have objectives, goals, and a process. And to make it work, the pressure and incentive have to come from the top.” ~ Vernon Jordan
- “Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.” ~ Plato
- “Tell a child, a husband or an employee that he is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, that he has no gift for it, and that he is doing it all wrong and you have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve. But use the opposite technique, be liberal with encouragement; make the thing seem easy to do, let the other person know that you have faith in his ability to do it, that he has an undeveloped flair for it – and he will practice until the dawn comes in at the window in order to excel.” ~ Dale Carnegie
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“I always felt that I hadn’t achieved what I wanted to achieve. I always felt I could get better. That’s the whole incentive.” ~ Virginia Wade
- “The incentive to ambition is the love of power.” ~ William Hazlitt
- “I get a bit of a kick out of exporting private enterprise and incentives.” ~ Fred L. Turner
- “The system that enables the most people to earn the most success is free enterprise, by matching up people’s skills, interests, and abilities. In contrast, redistribution simply spreads money around. Even worse, it attenuates the ability to earn success by perverting economic incentives.” ~ Arthur C. Brooks
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“People from both political parties have long recognized that welfare without work creates negative incentives that lead to permanent poverty. It robs people of self-esteem.” ~ Mitt Romney
- “Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production.” ~ Paul Hawken
- “But the system of prices ruling the market not only transmits information in the light of which economic agents can mutually adjust their actions, it also provides them with an incentive to exercise economy in terms of money.” ~ Michael Polanyi
- “Congress is headed in the wrong direction with this bill which removes any and all incentives from the food industry to improve their products for children.” ~ Bob Filner
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“What commercialism has brought to Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.” ~ Linus Torvalds
- “The problem we were struggling with within the closed market was what the incentive would be. You probably wouldn’t use dollars. But those are all questions that need to be explored.” ~ John Poindexter
- “Increased government spending can provide a temporary stimulus to demand and output but in the longer run higher levels of government spending crowd out private investment or require higher taxes that weaken growth by reducing incentives to save, invest, innovate, and work.” ~ Martin Feldstein , Work incentive quotes
- “ACT and SAT each have their own parts of the country. The GRE has its lock on graduate admissions. And so, one could blame the companies, but really, economically, they have no incentive to change things very much because they’re getting the business.” ~ Robert Sternberg
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“I would not be opposed to devising a new system of pensions, in which one part was based on collective provision, but which also gave incentives for people to take out an additional, personal plan.” ~ Jacques Delors
- “Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.” ~ Barney Frank
- “The answer for healthcare is market incentives, not healthcare by a Godzilla-sized government bureaucracy.” ~ Mitt Romney
- “Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.” ~ Hosea Ballou
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“When you’re working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.” ~ Dave Van Ronk
- “To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue.” ~ Walter Scott
- “I said it’s impossible to have an amnesty without ID cards and a clean database, because you firstly don’t have any incentives for people to actually come up front and register, and make themselves available, and secondly you have no means of tracking them.” ~ David Blunkett
- “I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill.” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“Despair is a great incentive to honorable death.” ~ Quintus Curtius Rufus
- “First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “The extras are a nice bonus feature, but the main incentive is the musical experience.” ~ Aaron Neville
- “We must shift the energy policy debate in America with an increased focus on alternative and renewable fuels and Congress must pass meaningful alternative fuels and incentive programs to help move the U.S. away from dependence on foreign oil.” ~ Rick Renzi
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“Outright bans on plastic bags may not be the best solution, but education and incentives to get people to stop using them are necessary.” ~ David Suzuki
- “I love the ability to work with very good managers and to provide the right incentives for them, and truly become a partner with that management, and make that management take a long view.” ~ Henry Kravis
- “Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.” ~ Philip Larkin
- “One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.” ~ W. E. B. Du Bois
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“The current administration has made the decision to cut dollars going for community development block grants, for various incentives to bring cities back.” ~ Stephanie Tubbs Jones
- “Every musical movement that is big enough has to produce some good musicians who wouldn’t have had the incentive to start playing without it.” ~ Alexis Korner
- “New technology is useful, but it’s inefficient and ugly; it knows it’ll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else” ~ Tom Holt
- “The Constitution wanted artists to have control over their works because they knew it would create incentive to create more works. That is clearly still the goal.” ~ Hilary Rosen
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“But the dollars spent on economic incentives and new investment strategies are wasted unless we seriously address the two most important economic issues in Kansas: education and health care” ~ Kathleen Sebelius
- “Well, first of all, we now have everybody with the exception of India, Pakistan, and Israel, and I don’t think these three countries are going to join by simply providing them an incentive, in terms of technology.” ~ Mohamed ElBaradei
- “Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer but is the incentive to progress.” ~ Herbert Hoover
- “Reforming the way the state works with businesses and providing incentives for employers will help preserve and create new jobs in Massachusetts.” ~ Mitt Romney
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“There are no benefactors in Canada because there is no incentive.” ~ Lara St. John
- “Just because scientists have the knowledge to do it, the technology to do it, and some may even have a financial motive or other incentives to do it, does not make it right.” ~ Nathan Deal
- “If I thought that any of this was preordained, then it takes away any kind of incentive to struggle, or to put up with things, to reach for those impossible dreams, all those dramatic things.” ~ Gary Numan
- “It’s not just buying the company. Sure, we picked the right companies, and we picked the right management and, most importantly, we’ve given them the right incentive to perform.” ~ Henry Kravis
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“And getting married this autumn was certainly an additional incentive to spend rather more time in England.” ~ Jill Dando
- “When I was a child and teenager I read whenever I had the opportunity, but since then I’ve found it hard to read as much as I’d like, children, work, and pets all providing powerful incentives to escape into a book and a practical reason why I rarely do so.” ~ Louise Brown
- “What will drive people if they don’t have money or reward? The reward is the end of war, the end of poverty, most crime, and the end of begging for medical care. Everyone will be cared for and educated. There will be no taxation and no advantage group. No technical elitism, or any other kind of elitism. If that isn’t incentive enough, then I don’t know what is.” ~ Jacque Fresco , Money incentive quotes
- “The ownership of computers in the home is far less than the statistics show, because usually when the computer breaks down once, that is the end of it for a long, long time. They do not have the money or incentive to get the computer repaired.” ~ Major Owens
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“Frustrated love has been the incentive for many great works.” ~ John N. Mitchell
- “The ownership of computers in the home is far less than the statistics show, because usually when the computer breaks down once, that is the end of it for a long, long time. They do not have the money or incentive to get the computer repaired.” ~ Major Owens
- “We need to fashion policies with proper incentives to reduce the amount of carbon we are putting in the atmosphere.” ~ William Ruckelshaus
- “Our strategic dialogue with China can both protect American interests and uphold our principles, provided we are honest about our differences on human rights and other issues and provided we use a mix of targeted incentives and sanctions to narrow these differences.” ~ Madeleine Albright
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“Natural resources are so vast that no single individual or business is going to protect them; they don’t have an incentive to.” ~ William Weld
- “Democratic leaders, whose power is ultimately dependent on popular support, are held accountable for failing to improve the lives of their citizens. Therefore, they have a powerful incentive to keep their societies peaceful and prosperous.” ~ Natan Sharansky
- “Saddam Hussein has invited members from the U.S. Congress to visit Iraq. Man, how stupid is Hussein? If you think Bush had incentive to bomb Iraq before, imagine if Congress was over there.” ~ Jay Leno
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“Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.” ~ George Carlin
- “All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They’re fascinated with incentives.” ~ Steven Soderbergh
- “The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.” ~ Thomas Sowell
