Many potential poets and philosophers became businessmen ... the promising thing in the nature of American business was due to this fact, that it was built, not by conventional businessmen, but by potential philosophers and poets. If you take a potential philosopher and make him a businessman, he acts in a beautiful way. To him all action is the same. Business is business. Action is the same thing. He will collate and combine factories, mines, and railroads, the way a philosopher generalizes idea.
- Eric Hoffer, Interview