Daily Inspiration Quote by B. C. Forbes

There’s a blunt, almost automotive brutality to Forbes’s warning: agency isn’t optional; it’s survival. “Drive” does double duty here, casting business as both a vehicle and a contest of momentum. You’re either hands on the wheel, or you’re roadkill. The line works because it compresses a whole economic worldview into a single, binary choice: act or be acted upon.

As a journalist who helped define modern business media, Forbes wasn’t speaking from a boardroom lectern so much as from the newsroom’s front row seat to churn. He watched companies rise on innovation, pricing power, and managerial discipline, then fall to complacency and faster rivals. The subtext is distinctly early-20th-century American: markets are not polite; they are indifferent. Progress is assumed, competition is constant, and the penalty for drift is elimination. That’s Social Darwinism cleaned up into a motivational sentence.

The intent isn’t inspiration so much as inoculation against comfort. Forbes is telling owners and executives to treat leadership as a daily verb: steer strategy, push sales, control costs, invest before you feel ready. Even “driven out” implies force from the outside - customers changing tastes, new technologies, economic shocks, competitors willing to undercut. You don’t lose because you were evil or unlucky; you lose because you stopped moving first.

It’s also a subtle defense of managerial authority. In Forbes’s framing, decisive leadership justifies itself: if you hesitate, the market will decide for you.