Malcolm Stevenson Forbes (1919–90) was an American business leader and socialite. The owner-publisher of the Forbes magazine 1957–90, he was notorious for his opulent lifestyle and his self-glorification.
Born in Brooklyn, New York City, Forbes inherited his wealth from his father, B. C. Forbes, who launched Malcolm at the Fairfield Times newspaper as owner and publisher only days after his matriculation from Princeton University.
After serving in the Army during World War II, Malcolm became a state senator in New Jersey 1951–58 and contested unsuccessfully for governor his 1957. When his father died in 1954, Malcolm Forbes became publisher and editor in chief of Forbes. Under his direction, the glossy business magazine flourished from a circulation of 100,000 to 720,000. He also founded the Nation’s Heritage magazine and a journal for art lovers called Egg.
A well-known collector, Forbes developed properties in California, Maine, and Fiji, and owned a château in Normandy, a mansion in London, an island in the South Seas, a palace in Tangier, Morocco, and collections of motorcycles, Peter Carl Fabergé imperial Easter eggs, and Oriental paintings. He set six world records in hot air ballooning.
Branded as a man who adored the spotlight, Forbes was well known for his extravagant lifestyle. He earned the nickname “the happiest millionaire.” On his last birthday, he incited controversy by giving a $2 million party, for which he flew some 1,000 guests to Tangier, Morocco. Not only that, he went out of his way to make sure that everyone who had not been invited knew what they had missed.
Forbes wrote More Than I Dreamed: A Lifetime of Collecting (1989.) A famous biography is Christopher Winans’s Malcolm Forbes: The Man Who Had Everything (1990.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Malcolm S. Forbes
Making mistakes is human. Repeating ’em is too.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Mistakes
Retirement kills more people than hard work ever did.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Retirement
For corporations to be bedfellows with the arts is good business for both. The architecture that houses a company is a more visible statement than the president’s in the annual report. Ditto interiors, particularly of offices and sometimes, dramatically, in plants. For solvent businesses, support of community cultural undertakings in music, drama, dance creates great goodwill. Also, the existence of such activities is often important to the executives and their families that companies want to keep or attract to keep.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Culture
The only unforgivable sin: Being unforgiving.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Forgiveness
Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Ability, One liners
When what we are is what we want to be, that’s happiness.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Happiness
One who never asks either knows everything or nothing.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Questions
It doesn’t matter to me if a man is from Harvard or Sing Sing. We hire the man, not his history.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Business
A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man’s history of endless warring. What’s to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II’s Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man’s perspective.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: War
Everybody has to be somebody to somebody to be anybody.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Service
There’s no way to move without making waves.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
A man who enjoys responsibility usually gets it. A man who merely likes exercising authority usually loses it.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Power, Responsibility
Failure is success if we learn from it.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Adversity, Success, Failure, Strength
It’s the less-bright students who make teachers teach better.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Education
In buying stock, buy brains and you’ll profit.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
How can you avoid people who say, “Let me tell you, and then do?”
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Advice
In the long run, a short cut seldom is.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
How would you know what happy is if you’ve never been otherwise.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Happiness
Whether you think you can
or think you can’t—
you are right.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Personal & Confidential. Letters so marked should be. When the contents are only printed matter, though, the minifrauder succeeds in sowing illwill & ire.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Writing
The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Man, Men
It’s great to arrive, but the trip’s most always most of the fun.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Life
People are talking about the new “civilized” way to fire executives. You kick ’em upstairs. They’re given a little, a liberal tithe, nothing to do, and a secretary to do it with. What a way to go.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
The best vision is insight.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Prophecy, Vision
If you don’t know, it’s not always necessary to admit it.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Knowledge
It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Problems
Real writers-that is, capital W Writers-rarely make much money. Their biggest reward is the occasional reader’s response…. Commentators-in-print voicing big fat opinions-you might call us small w writers-get considerably more feedback than Writers. The letters I personally find most flattering are not the very rare ones that speak well of my editorials, but the occasional reader who wants to know who writes them. I always happily assume the letter-writers is implying that the editorials are so good that I couldn’t have written them myself.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Writing
Too few accomplish twice as much as too many.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Lie detectors may have some limited uses, but for sure one of them isn’t in the corporate hiring process. For the CIA, the FBI, the military’s supersecret areas, lie detectors may have some psychological value. As proof positive, for sure they are not. According to a recent New York Times article, Leading academic critics contend that lie detectors are lucky to be right 70% of the time and are often no better than chance. Pentagon officials stress that “no machine can detect a lie”; lie detectors can only detect stress, may well reflect fear, surprise or anger at the interrogation rather than guilt. … .
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Lies
Crime in the city streets is more than a political issue. It’s a too rampant fact…. In Indianapolis they have come up with a most sensible, affordable approach to the problem. Policemen are assigned their police patrol cars for personal use after hours. They are encouraged to use the police car while taking the family shopping, to the movies, and everywhere one takes one’s family. As a result, says the Police Chief’s assistant, we may have as many as 400 cars on the street instead of 100 or so per shift. (And) the presence of the police car obviously indicates the proximity of policemen.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Evil
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B. C. Forbes Scottish-born American Journalist
Helen Gurley Brown American Publisher
Frederick Buechner American Writer, Theologian
Marlene Dietrich German-American Actress, Singer
Isadora Duncan American Dancer
Andy Warhol American Painter