Walter Wriston Quotes

#1. Every line in the government's budget has its own constituency.

Walter Wriston

#2. There'll be a growing disparity between economics and politics. An economy that grows so rapidly is intractably global. On the other hand, the current political system is intractably national. So there is a growing dichotomy between a global economy and locally based politics.

Walter Wriston

#3. All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.

Walter Wriston

#4. Many organizations are now trying to walk under the banner of The Learning Organization, realizing that knowledge is our most important product ... But the only place that I've seen it is in the Army. As one colonel said, "We realized a while ago that it's better to learn than be dead."

Walter Wriston

#5. One man saying that everything is wrong can command coast-to-coast attention in living color, a power not given to an absolute monarch a century ago.

Walter Wriston

#6. Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is.

Walter Wriston

#7. If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.

Walter Wriston

#8. Information is a business in itself. It is also something that has made control impossible ... you cannot get customers to accept prices in one place when they know there's a better deal elsewhere. It's a whole new world.

Walter Wriston

#9. When you retire you go from Who's Who to Who's That?

Walter Wriston

#10. The Doomsayers have always had their uses, since they trigger the coping mechanism that often prevents the events they forecast.

Walter Wriston

#11. Capital will always go where it's welcome and stay where it's well treated.
Capital is not just money. It's also talent and ideas.
They, too, will go where they're welcome and stay where they are well treated.

Walter Wriston

#12. The guy with the competitive advantage is the one with the best technology.

Walter Wriston

#13. A country does not go bankrupt.

Walter Wriston

#14. Countries don't go out of business ... The infrastructure doesn't go away, the productivity of the people doesn't go away, the natural resources don't go away. And so their assets always exceed their liabilities, which is the technical reason for bankruptcy. And that's very different from a company.

Walter Wriston

#15. The information revolution has changed wealth. Intellectual capital is far more important than money.

Walter Wriston

#16. All of life is the management of risk, not its elimination.

Walter Wriston

#17. As long as capital-both human and money-can move toward opportunity, trade will not balance.

Walter Wriston

#18. Human capital will go where it is wanted, and it will stay where it is well treated. It cannot be driven; it can only be attracted.

Walter Wriston

#19. Capital goes to where it can escape taxation and be used to pay employees in sacks of rice.

Walter Wriston

#20. Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.

Walter Wriston

#21. The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.

Walter Wriston

#22. Banking is a branch of the information business.

Walter Wriston

#23. Risk is not a dirty word.

Walter Wriston

#24. The greatest testimony to the human spirit that I'm witnessing now is the fact that people still come back to work, after all that has been done to them. They are still willing to participate for a more positive future if they would be sincerely invited.

Walter Wriston