What I’m talking about is a kind of worldliness that you gain from a wide range of experience. There is a kind of freedom about what they say, as though they have walked a path beyond the obvious. There is often a sense of humility, and a sense of simplicity too.

SA, given its history, has lots of examples of people who have seen an enormous volume of life, and now have a wonderfully full and complete range of views. The most obvious international example is the formidable and much quoted duo who run the investment house Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

I’ll spare you their greatest hits of quotable quotes, but there is one I really like from Buffett: “Candour benefits us as managers. The CEO who misleads others in private may eventually mislead himself in private.” And there are so many more. And so many of them are funny. Talking about the difficulty in discovering a perfect deal, Buffett told the story of a man who spent 20 years trying to find the perfect woman and eventually he found her. Unfortunately, she was looking for the perfect man.

There are two other people I have never met but really admire from a distance just because of the wonderful things they have said. One is Bob Iger, the former CEO and Chairman of Walt Disney. What he did with Disney is just extraordinary, buying Pixar, establishing the Marvel series of titles, re-establishing the Star Wars franchise, and eventually buying the Fox movie assets.

But his view of the world matches his extraordinary facility at business. “The heart and soul of a company is creativity and innovation,” is perhaps his most famous quote. As his business history demonstrates, he is particularly acute on innovation. “You can’t allow tradition to get in the way of innovation. There’s a need to respect the past, but it’s a mistake to revere your past.”

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Iger also has a fine view of leadership, as I suppose you need when you run an organisation with 125,000 people. “What I’ve really learned over time is that optimism is a very, very important part of leadership.” And also, “No one wants to follow a pessimist. You can be sceptical, you can be realistic, but you can’t be cynical.”

What’s particularly noteworthy about Iger is his support of immigration in the face of public and political hostility to the concept in the US. “I firmly believe that we cannot shut our borders to immigrants. I think a fair and just immigration policy is good for our country and good for our society.” He just thinks something and speaks out and critics be damned. Love it.

My next candidate may come as a surprise: Jeff Bezos. Because Amazon is such a powerhouse these days, it’s easy to forget how close the company came to complete implosion. Much of the character of the organisation owes its nature to Amazon’s former CEO. I also love, by the way, that he left. He just left. How many people can leave a business they were so integral in creating at its absolute height.

But you can see a bit of his character in his famous quotes: by all accounts, he is pretty tough minded. “Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.”

But he is also touchingly disarming. “My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

South Africa, the crucible of hope and hurt, has many good examples too. Allow me to cite just two: Reuel Khoza and Wiseman Nkuhlu. Nkuhlu, an example of nominative determinism if ever there was one, spent his youth on Robben Island, but ended up becoming SA’s first black chartered accountant and has been a board member of a really ridiculous number of corporate boards. But his obvious heartland was academic study and he often talks about the centrality of education, self-reliance, resilience, and integrity. “Whatever the reasons, history shows that no nation has ever developed without its members taking responsibility for their own development,” he wrote in one of his many speeches on the topic.

Khoza is famous for many things but what stands out for me was his chairman’s report in Nedbank’s annual report. Khoza wrote: “Our political leadership’s moral quotient is degenerating and we are fast losing the checks and balances that are necessary to prevent a recurrence of the past. We have a duty to build and develop this nation and to call to book the putative leaders who, due to sheer incapacity to deal with the complexity of 21st-century governance and leadership, cannot lead.” This was in 2012 – talk about prescience.

There are so many more. The reason I am writing this is that I’m trying to make a collection of great things said by SA’s business leaders. So many people have bosses who they remember saying something interesting or quotable. If you remember any, please do send them to me. BM/DM