Success Quote by Paul Getty

Getty’s line isn’t an observation so much as a worldview in a trench coat: the assumption that “profit” is the only honest scorecard and that anything failing to hit it is, by definition, suspect. As a businessman, he’s speaking from the center of a culture that treats markets less like tools and more like moral arbiters. The word “notorious” does heavy lifting. It’s not “often” or “sometimes”; it’s a courtroom adjective, implying a public record of guilt. That choice turns a policy debate into a character indictment.

The intent is practical and political. In one sentence, Getty arms readers against state ownership by framing it as predictably inefficient, a kind of institutional dead end. The subtext is even sharper: nationalized industries aren’t merely mismanaged; they’re structurally incapable of discipline because they lack the clean threat of failure. If profit is pressure, then the state’s safety net becomes the very thing that softens performance.

The line also smuggles in a narrowing of what public enterprises are for. Many nationalized sectors exist to provide stability, universal access, or strategic control, goals that can conflict with quarterly profitability. Getty sidesteps that by implying that if it doesn’t pay, it doesn’t work. That’s rhetorically efficient: it replaces messy trade-offs with a single metric that flatters his own class’s expertise.

Context matters, too: postwar Britain and Europe made nationalization a mainstream instrument; by the late 20th century, privatization became a dominant counter-story. Getty’s phrasing reads like a businessman’s contribution to that ideological pivot: confident, reductive, and designed to sound like common sense.