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
Venture nothing, and life is less than it should be.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Trying
Keeping score of old scores and scars, getting even and one-upping, always makes you less than you are.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Anger, Forgiveness
Over the years, I’ve evolved a somewhat heretical but time-and mind-saving approach to books, articles, editorials that deal with weighty matters. More often than not, by beginning at the end and contemplating the conclusions, one can determine if it’s worth going through the whole to get there.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Books
Putting pen to paper lights more fire than matches ever will.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Writing
Listening to advice often accomplishes far more than heeding it.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Advice
Most oldsters are fascinated by the Future, while the young love to look back to earlier days, especially their own.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Generations
To measure the man, measure his heart.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Character, Honesty
Presence is more than just being there.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Focus, Concentration, Perspective, Romance
If you don’t know what you want to do, it’s harder to do it.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Goals
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
Retirement kills more people than hard work ever did.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Retirement
Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Rightness, Right
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
One often reads about the art of conversation-how it’s dying or what’s needed to make it flourish, or how rare good ones are. But wouldn’t you agree that the infinitely more valuable rara avis is a good listener?
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Listening
Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Business
It ticks me no end when people get ticked off at those of us who comment audibly and in print on events and problems. That’s what we’re paid for. Why clutter up your mind with a bunch of facts that might inhibit the solve-ability of us who must express an opinion? After all, all the world cries out for a solution to its problems, and we supply them right and left. Come to think of it, it’s we who should be giving our deplorers and detractors the blast; because 99% of the time they don’t do as we say.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Writing
U.S. Steel. It’s probably hard for the younger generation to realize what a giant in every way, shape and form United States Steel once was in our economy. The fabled ogre of corporate folklore is now sick and tired, more likely to be pitied than pilloried. Since Ben Fairless’ day, Big Steel has fumbled from one costly wrong decision to another, been heard when silence would have been wiser, been silent when speaking up would have been in order; spent wads for what were often the wrong new facilities and saved when salvation lay in modernizing. Sure it’s still big. But it’s sad to see the giant in such need of succor.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Business
It is a damned sight easier to start wars than to end them. This truth has been stated for as long and as often as it has been ignored. High time and thank God, we are at least moving toward de-escalation in Vietnam. The road to extrication will be long, painful, bitter. But it must be trod. We are so bogged down in Vietnam that we cannot respond effectively anywhere else in the world to a military power play except through atomic bombardment.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: War
What’s an expert? I read somewhere, that the more a man knows, the more he knows, he doesn’t know. So I suppose one definition of an expert would be someone who doesn’t admit out loud that he knows enough about a subject to know he doesn’t really know how much.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Experts, Professionalism
After the fact, our hearts always go out to the fallen Goliaths. Yet we invariably root for their Davids. Until they’re winners.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Winning
Why, just a couple of economic seasons ago, was idle cash considered an indication of bad management or lazy management? Because it meant that management didn’t have this money out at work … Now look. Presto! A new fashion! Cash is back in! Denigrating liquidity has dropped quicker than hemlines. A management is now saluted if it has some cash, some liquidity, doesn’t have to go to the money market at huge interest rates to get the wherewithal to keep going and growing. Along with Ben Franklin, my father and your father would understand and applaud this new economic fashion . … .
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Money
It’s more fun to arrive at a conclusion than to justify it.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
As you get older there shouldn’t be anything you won’t try. The payoff is that you open up whole new avenues that are fun. It’s a misinterpretation of life to live it only in preparation for the next one. To subordinate the one you’ve got to an indefinite next round is foolish. It’s a waste of this life not to live this life. What’s next is anybody’s guess.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Aging
There is never enough time, unless you’re serving it.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
If you can read and don’t, you’re dumb.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Reading
Occasionally we all inherit, or are given, or get something or some things that are too good to use for a variety of seemingly sound but really quite silly reasons-they’re heirlooms or too rare or too expensive or too fragile or too pretty. The result is heirloom linen handed down from generation to generation that falls apart when some benighted heiress decides to air it. While I’m glad that past generations saved some things we now enjoy, we are enjoying them by using them instead of carefully storing them for our kids-in turn to store. Unused beautiful things are a waste.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Family
To switch lads and lassies from quickie ceremonies back to the catered works in to-be-worm-only-once white dresses, the (wedding) garment producers have turned to sociology. Through statistics as carefully laid out as a bridal train, they are establishing a correlation showing a higher divorce rate for the informally gowned…. They may just have something there…. If a bride has sunk a bunk of savings into a dress she can’t use again in a second wedding, she might think twice about having a second.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Marriage
By the time we’ve made it, we’ve had it.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Health
Most everyone wants to do what’s fair, right, and good, but knowing what is is often the tough part.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Justice
Can you understand why the Congress, most states and most cities refuse to pass legislation requiring the registration and licensing of any and all guns? For the life of me, I can’t. We must register our cars and be licensed to drive. In many places we must get licenses for dogs and even bicycles. Being required to register firearms and show the competence and capacity to handle them hardly seems unreasonable, hardly seems an infringement of freedom. What is it that blocks such legislation? Why do they block it? How are they able to block it?
—Malcolm S. Forbes
Topics: Violence
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Katharine Graham American Publisher
William Feather American Publisher
M. F. K. Fisher American Writer
C. P. Scott British Journalist, Editor
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