Top 100 Ted Turner Quotes
#1. It's been a long time since anybody caught me saying something stupid.
Ted Turner
#2. I like snakes. I like hummingbirds. There's nothing on earth I don't like. Frogs. Salamanders. The bunnies, the giraffes, the hippopotamuses.
Ted Turner
#3. I thought, between sports and news and television and friendship, that you could end the Cold War and, by God, we did.
Ted Turner
#4. It's going to cost trillions of dollars to rework the energy sources all over the world. Were going to have to move away from fossil fuels.
Ted Turner
#5. The worst thing you can do if you want to start a fight is to use derogatory terminology.
Ted Turner
#6. I'm 68 and a half years old; I grew up with newspapers; I love newspapers; I love the news business. I started CNN; I'm a journalist and proud of it.
Ted Turner
#7. Life is like a B-movie. You don't want to leave in the middle of it but you don't want to see it again.
Ted Turner
#8. Sports is like a war without the killing.
Ted Turner
#9. I don't watch entertainment. I haven't watched in years. I want to see serious news.
Ted Turner
#10. I'm a millionaire, I guess, but I'm just a normal person and I like everybody, taxi drivers, whoever you are, to call me by my first name and talk to me on a man-to-man basis. I think the garbage collector is as important as the goddamned president.
Ted Turner
#11. I've had the good fortune to have a much more diverse life than most people would, professional sports and television and news and movies.
Ted Turner
#12. I see what keeps people young: work!
Ted Turner
#13. Music has a great power for bringing people together. With so many forces in this world acting to drive wedges between people, it's important to preserve those things that help us experience our common humanity.
Ted Turner
#14. It was okay for people to write negative things about me just as long as they spelled my name right.
Ted Turner
#15. I think we've already voted at the U.N., in the Security Council, to get rid of nuclear weapons. Let's get rid of them. Let's get rid of ours and then Iran will stop, I believe. And so everybody else will, because if everybody doesn't have them, then we're safe, at least safe from a nuclear attack.
Ted Turner
#16. Even when I started in 1970, I knew that television was having a negative effect on our society.
Ted Turner
#17. I'm hard of hearing. I miss a lot. It's really tough.
Ted Turner
#18. If I had any humility I would be perfect.
Ted Turner
#19. To succeed you have to be innovative.
Ted Turner
#20. I have both sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation, which are both debilitating conditions.
Ted Turner
#21. The word impossible does not exist for me. I've got a lot of signal flags in my flag bag, but there is not a white one in there. I am going to keep fighting until the day I die - and might keep on fighting afterward ... depends on where I am.
Ted Turner
#22. The media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It's not healthy.
Ted Turner
#23. Every action or inaction has an impact-good or bad-upon our surroundings, and anything we do today will have an impact on the lives of our grandchildren.
Ted Turner
#24. Exposure to defeat is a very important thing. Anyone who doesn't look to get beaten is doing a disservice to himself.
Ted Turner
#25. If you think you're a second-class citizen, you are.
Ted Turner
#26. Many times through the ages, like as not the chance appears, but because of indecision, man's fond hopes are drowned in tears.
Ted Turner
#28. The world and life have been mighty good to me. And I want to put something back.
Ted Turner
#29. I've got a virtually limitless supply of bullshit.
Ted Turner
#30. There are too many people, that's why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff.
Ted Turner
#31. Be sure to set your goals so high that you can't possibly accomplish them in one lifetime. That way you'll always have something ahead of you. I made the mistake of setting my goals too low, and now I'm having a hard time coming up with new ones.
Ted Turner
#32. If there is a God, he is not doing a good job of protecting the earth. He's kind of checked out.
Ted Turner
#33. I haven't been in a store to buy anything for five years.
Ted Turner
#34. There's really five companies who control 90% of what we read, see, and hear.
Ted Turner
#35. Even if we didn't have greenhouse gases, were going to have to move away from fossil fuels, as we're going to run out. They're finite, whereas solar and wind are infinite.
Ted Turner
#36. The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that's all they have. The Israelis they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism.
Ted Turner
#37. Make a way, find a way or get out of the way.
Ted Turner
#38. If you had the most prestige and you were the network that everybody turned to in times of a crisis, that that was the most important position, in the news business, to hold.
Ted Turner
#39. Where's the upside in opening your mouth?
Ted Turner
#40. Every man sees a little of himself in Rhett Butler.
Ted Turner
#41. The chance for mistakes is about equal to the number of crew squared.
Ted Turner
#42. War has been good to me from a financial standpoint but I don't want to make money that way. I don't want blood money.
Ted Turner
#43. My son is now an 'entrepreneur.' That's what you're called when you don't have a job.
Ted Turner
#44. To be happy in this world, first you need a cell phone and then you need an airplane. Then you're truly wireless.
Ted Turner
#45. I believe in a reasonable amount of "right to bear arms". But private citizens of the United States are not allowed to own nuclear weapons. I always wanted a nuclear weapon, if I could have gotten one. I'm every other kind of power, but I'm not a nuclear power.
Ted Turner
#47. Over a three year period, I gave away half of what I had. To be honest, my hands shook as I signed it away. I knew I was taking myself out of the race to be the richest man in the world.
Ted Turner
#48. If I had to predict, the way things are going, I'd say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct or nearly extinct within 50 years. Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.
Ted Turner
#49. Nuclear war would really set back cable.
Ted Turner
#50. I'd rather be smart and poor than rich and dumb.
Ted Turner
#51. The happiest people are those who are contributing to society.
Ted Turner
#52. If I sold all my liabilities, I wouldn't own anything. My wife's a liability, my kids are liabilities, and I haven't sold them.
Ted Turner
#53. Man should be judged by the deeds done to help his fellow man.
Ted Turner
#54. The worst sin, the ultimate sin for me, in anything, is to be bored.
Ted Turner
#55. I lost 80 percent of my wealth and then gave away over half of the rest. So I'm a man of modest means now. But if you budget carefully and watch your expenditures, you can get by on a couple billion dollars.
Ted Turner
#56. All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.
Ted Turner
#57. I was cable when cable wasn't cool.
Ted Turner
#58. Just because your ratings are bigger doesn't mean you're better.
Ted Turner
#59. If you can get yourself where you're not afraid of dying, then you can move forward a lot faster.
Ted Turner
#60. The whole idea of television news or any kind of news is to inform people about things they need to know about.
Ted Turner
#61. I'd like to say that right now, in the last few years, the Democrats have been closer - have been more pro-environment. The coal industry is pretty well entrenched in the Republican Party and that's one of the things that we need to phase out.
Ted Turner
#62. CNN anchor Gwen Scott claimed it is common knowledge that Turner sits in his office and smokes marijuana.
Ted Turner
#63. Basically we are chimpanzees with about two percent more intelligence and a little less hair.
Ted Turner
#64. I didn't care what, how much adversity life threw at me. I intended to get to the top.
Ted Turner
#65. Hell, we spent $200 Billion to get a scared guy who needed a shave out of a fox-hole! And he may even die of prostate cancer before we even get a chance to try him, dammit!
Ted Turner
#66. Do something. Either lead, follow or get out of the way.
Ted Turner
#67. I'm sure God, wherever he is, wants to see us get along with one another and love one another.
Ted Turner
#68. If the perpetrators of the World Trade Center plane crashes had a nuclear weapon, there's no doubt in my mind but that they would've detonated it in New York.
Ted Turner
#69. Women? I love women. Life would have been virtually zero without them. Journalism? I really feel like I am a journalist ... And courage? I had a boat named Courageous.
Ted Turner
#70. Over-population is the 'cause of drive-by shootings' and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants.
Ted Turner
#71. I wanted to better inform the world.
Ted Turner
#72. I love this planet ... I want to see the environment preserved and I want to see the human race preserved. And I'd like to see everybody living decently in a more equitable, kind-hearted, thoughtful, generous world.
Ted Turner
#73. If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect.
Ted Turner
#74. I believe in pulling together to make the country better right rather than pulling, tearing it apart for partisan reasons. I think the country comes first.
Ted Turner
#75. You can never quit. Winners never quit, and quitters never win.
Ted Turner
#76. A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.
Ted Turner
#77. It was a struggle financing CNN, but I did it without ever asking the government for a nickel.
Ted Turner
#78. I've never run into a guy who could win at the top level in anything today and didn't have the right attitude, didn't give it everything he had, at least while he was doing it; wasn't prepared and didn't have the whole program worked out.
Ted Turner
#79. I like Obama. I don't know who could do a better job. He's got an incredibly tough situation, and a good heart and mind. I'd like to see him rally support a little better.
Ted Turner
#80. Never set goals you can reach in your lifetime.
Ted Turner
#81. What the Bible says is really true-it's better to give than to receive.
Ted Turner
#82. The more good I do, the more money has come in. You have to learn to give. You're not born to give. You're born selfish.
Ted Turner
#83. There is no greater legacy that we can leave our children and grandchildren than a peaceful and safer world.
Ted Turner
#85. I see the whole field of environmentalis m and population as nothing more
than the survival of the human species. I have wanted to have some bumper
sticker made up saying 'Save the Humans'. At the bottom of it all, we are
trying to save ourselves.
Ted Turner
#86. Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.
Ted Turner
#87. Struggling hard to achieve something is the most fun I get.
Ted Turner
#88. I was gonna go broke if I didn't get things turned around real fast.
Ted Turner
#89. The biggest thing I learned from losing? Winning's better.
Ted Turner
#90. I'm a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word. I say something I didn't think through adequately. I mean, I don't type my speeches, then sit up there and read them off the teleprompter, you know. I wing it.
Ted Turner
#91. During my first several days there I really did feel like a fish out of water. After years of following a military dress code I wasn't even sure what to wear. The one place I felt like I fit in was out on a boat and, fortunately, trials for the freshman sailing team began right away.
Ted Turner
#92. I regret that I wasn't more successful with my marriages, but it is what it is.
Ted Turner
#93. I'm no genius. I'm not at all; I just happen to look five or 10 years ahead and think things through ...
Ted Turner
#94. I've always tried to do the smartest and best thing.
Ted Turner
#95. We must go through a natural revolution if we are to survive on earth. We need to change people's perceptions. If there's no environment, there's no human race. We are in a state of global denial.
Ted Turner
#96. I didn't get here for my acting ... but I love show business.
Ted Turner
#97. You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for.
Ted Turner
#98. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten
not ten, but thirty or forty years, and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.
Ted Turner
#99. There's a fine line between being colorful and being an asshole, and I hope I'm still just colorful.
Ted Turner
#100. Men should be disqualified for public office. Women should run the planet. They're better than us.
Ted Turner
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