Top 100 Goldman Quotes
#1. The Justice Department needs to investigate how Goldman Sachs was able to steer things in such a manner through their former employees in the Bush administration, so that in the end Goldman's competitors have disappeared and Goldman is left standing.
Michael Moore
#2. You can demonize Goldman Sachs all you want, and I'm sure there are reasons to do it. But the real pressure is all of us pressuring the companies for stock returns, and that leads to all kinds of decisions.
John Wells
#3. This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it.
Matt Taibbi
#4. The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.
Michael Lewis
#5. The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
P. J. O'Rourke
#6. If Grandma Goldman ever smiled, she must have done it in the bathroom with the door locked. She had been the undisputed head of her own family, ruling with an iron hand and a mouth full of rocks.
Edith Konecky
#7. You have a guy like Bernie Madoff literally steal $80 billion, you know, AIG steal hundreds of billions, Goldman Sachs. Crime has changed so much, and to really do a movie with, like, drug dealers or drug smugglers is kind of almost quaint at this point.
Adam McKay
#8. I've heard that one-half of the students at elite schools want to go into private equity or hedge funds. They want to keep up with their age cohorts at Goldman. This can't possibly end well in terms of meeting these expectations.
Charlie Munger
#9. THERE WAS NEVER A SCHINDLER'S LIST. It was drawn up by a man called Goldman. This man took money to put a name on that list - no money, no place on the list. I was told this by a Dr Schwartz, in Vienna; he had paid in diamonds to save his wife
Emilie Schindler
#10. I'm not sure exactly what Victor told Dr. Goldman, but I don't think he fully knew what was going on ... I think he was really oblivious. I don't think he knew.
Kelli White
#11. You want to know who owns America? A few at the top. And they've got one thing on their mind. No change. Look at Obama, all that hope and promise. No change. He went to Wall Street, had a fundraiser - $35,800 a ticket - and you know who the host was? Goldman friggin' Sachs.
Buddy Roemer
#12. Stella Suberman's Suggestions for Further Reading
The Peddler's Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi, by Edward Cohen
The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, by Eli N. Evans
Insecure Prosperity, by Ewa Morawska
The Slow Way Back, by Judy Goldman
Stella Suberman
#13. I'd thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs.
Michael Lewis
#14. A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.
Russell Baker
#15. Banks like Goldman remain largely shielded from the impact of public opinion because while the public's only link to power is through the clumsy and highly imperfect avenue of elections, a bank of this size has a whole network of intimate connections with direct access to policy. In
Matt Taibbi
#16. It's easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.
David Brooks
#17. It sounded good. It was a story that Victor Conte told me to use. I was contacted by Dr. Goldman, and that's how the story came about. And that was my first time ever meeting, or speaking, to Dr. Goldman.
Kelli White
#18. Everyone thinks Goldman is so fucking smart," he railed. "Just because Goldman says this is the right valuation, you shouldn't assume it's correct just because Goldman said it. My brother works at Goldman, and he's an idiot!
Andrew Ross Sorkin
#19. What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.
Matt Taibbi
#20. When I was planning LearnVest, everyone told me I had to talk to Ann Kaplan, one of the first female partners at Goldman Sachs. Within five minutes of our meeting, she totally got the idea - and by the time I left, she was a seed investor.
Alexa Von Tobel
#21. And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
E.L. Doctorow
#22. I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing's Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.
Susie Bright
#23. Goldman, stop this nonsense, will you? I have looked at your file. I made a few phone calls.
Joel Dicker
#24. Nathaniel Rich wrote 'Odds Against Tomorrow' well before Hurricane Sandy and its surge crashed onto the isle of Manhattan, well before the streets were flooded and the subways drowned, only the Goldman Sachs building sparkling above the darkened avenues.
Cathleen Schine
#25. Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!
Douglas Rushkoff
#26. Halloween's coming. Kids get very imaginative in my neighborhood. Last year, three kids showed up as Goldman Sachs executives and demanded 4.5 billion pieces of candy.
Jay Leno
#27. Once handed the money, Paulson abandoned his promised strategy and instead essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a few others unnaturally selected for survival.
Michael Lewis
#28. You don't want to be rude but you have to be careful - there are a lot of strange people out there.
(Goldman attributes this quote to Cliff Robertson.)
William Goldman
#29. Wall Street is perhaps the most powerful economic and political force in this country. You have companies like Goldman Sachs, who just recently paid a settlement fine with the federal government for $5 billion for defrauding investors.
Bernie Sanders
#30. If you have a traditional view of economics, you're probably thinking of Ben Bernanke making Fed policy, or the guys creating financial derivatives at Goldman Sachs.
Emily Oster
#31. A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it's a well run institution - say, Goldman Sachs - it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.
Noam Chomsky
#32. I believe that if you go and ask a chief executive of a Goldman Sachs or a BP, and they answer you honestly ... they want monopolies, they want government subsidies, they want preferences - they're not interested in free markets.
Ian Bremmer
#33. In 2008, Goldman Sachs only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.
Bernie Sanders
#34. With an operating profit margin topping 40 percent, Fanuc makes 25 percent more income per employee than Goldman Sachs,
Anonymous
#35. We've had this program for a number of years now, called 10,000 Small Businesses, where Goldman Sachs has convened a group of partners to basically give business education to small business owners.
Lloyd Blankfein
#36. Most people who graduate from college think they have to make a perfect choice. Is it Goldman Sachs? Is it Google? Is it Apple? They think that their first job is going to determine their career, if not their life.
Guy Kawasaki
#37. On 'Sin Nombre,' Adriano Goldman and I improvised a lot of things on-site. We were working with untrained actors, and you can't really block a scene in a traditional way.
Cary Fukunaga
#38. I got into Goldman really by acquisition because I had gone - I grew up in east New York in the Linden Projects - I did go to fancy schools, but my resume wasn't up to a Wall Street set of resumes. I went to college. I went to law school and practiced for a while.
Lloyd Blankfein
#39. Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.
Michael Lewis
#40. Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph.) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending, I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming. William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Cornelia Funke
#41. Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.
John Scalzi
#42. As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended.
Michael Lewis
#43. Regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don't see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out.
Elizabeth Warren
#44. As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.
Joe R. Lansdale
#45. When, a few months later, Goldman Sachs announced it was setting aside $542,000 per employee for the 2006 bonus pool, he wrote again: "As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended." In
Michael Lewis
#46. Does anyone believe that Goldman Sachs is gonna give up a deal that would yield millions of dollars because someone fussed at them behind closed doors?
Elizabeth Warren
#47. I left Goldman Sachs. I was thinking about going to another Wall Street place. I didn't want to do that. That was crazy. After you work on Wall Street, it's a choice: would you rather work at McDonald's or on the sell side? I would choose McDonald's over the sell side.
David Tepper
#48. Our global corporate investment bank competes with Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and a bunch of other banks that are in those businesses. We may have slightly different products or services, but so what? That's always been true in American business.
Jamie Dimon
#49. Goldman Sachs did not leave the house before it began to burn; it was merely the first to dash through the exit - and then it closed the door behind it.
Michael Lewis
#50. My fellow Americans, good evening. My name is Becca Goldman and I weep with all of you.
I texted one word to Megan, 'Gag'
She wrote back: 'My name is Becca Goldman, and I sleep with all of you
Jeri Smith-Ready
#51. Goldman Sachs believes that economically empowering women globally is one of the best investments to grow economies, create jobs, and build more prosperous societies.
Dina Powell
#52. Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO. And you are losing ...
Barry Ritholtz
#53. People only have as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.
-Emma Goldman
Sophia Amoruso
#54. Having worked at four separate Wall Street firms, having seen a variety of talent at those places, and having competed against Goldman as a banker, one thing you have to be struck by is the power of their recruiting.
William D. Cohan
#55. I've nothing against Goldman Sachs. But Goldman Sachs isn't an investment bank. Goldman Sachs is a hedge fund. It's bigger than any hedge fund. It's more leveraged, to the power of three or five, than any hedge fund.
Nouriel Roubini
#56. If you like what Wall Street did for the housing market, you'll love what Wall Street is doing for commodities, Goldman's ability to influence any portion of the price for a key component of the industrial economy is simply unacceptable.
Carl Levin
#57. I can show up at a Goldman Sachs conference wearing a Judas Priest T-shirt - and I have - while everyone else is wearing the same dress.
Sophia Amoruso
#58. I'm an affluent screenwriter and all that - I'm a known screenwriter, but I'm not in the fraternity of the very, very major people. I would say a guy like Ernie Lehman, William Goldman, and a few others are quite a cut above.
Rod Serling
#59. I think that Goldman Sachs and the Pentagon determine more of America's outcome then any president or any congress, that sounds a bit cynical, but I think I am right.
Henry Rollins
#60. He accomplished this primarily by hooking up with his best friend, Henry Goldman, before the Goldman Sachs partnership. (They toyed with creating Goldman and Lehman but instead decided on splitting the profits 50/50.)
Kenneth L. Fisher
#61. Life isn't just fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. -William Goldman
Ann Brashares
#62. When I was starting out, William Goldman took me under his wing, and he's still the person I show pages to.
Aaron Sorkin
#63. The author and screenwriter William Goldman says that "the key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not in the way it expects.
Jon Steel
#64. Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins - its own and everybody else's. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.
Timothy Noah
#65. The head of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made it perfectly clear: sophisticated investors don't, or at least shouldn't, rely on trust. Those who bought the products the banks sold were consenting adults who should have known better.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#66. The sun?" Goldman said in an unguarded moment. "I hear they've shot it.
Alan Furst
#67. The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Matt Taibbi
#68. Barack Obama's large contributor was Goldman Sachs - same thing on the Republican side. If you go to both their conventions, you see the same lobbyists paying off both sides so they win either way.
Jesse Ventura
#69. The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.
Harlan Coben
#70. Why don't we have enough teachers of math and science in the public schools? One answer is well, if they knew the subject well, they'd also know enough to work for Google or Goldman Sachs or God knows where.
James Harris Simons
#71. William Goldman's Marathon Man was a novel that taught me about suspense. I was maybe 16 years old when I read it and I remember thinking, "You could put a gun to my head and I wouldn't put this book down." I loved that feeling - and want to give it others.
Harlan Coben
#72. Guys who can't get a job on Wall Street get a job at Moody's, as one Goldman Sachs trader-turned-hedge fund manager put it.
Michael Lewis
#73. One of their most famous coups was underwriting a $10 million loan for a growing mail-order house called Sears, Roebuck, headed by Goldman's distant relative. It was the first time a mail-order security had ever been on the market-a calculated risk, but one that paid off.
Kenneth L. Fisher
#74. I suppose I was dying again, so I asked the Lord of Permanent Affection for the strength to live the day. Clearly, the answer came in the affirmative."
"I didn't know there was such a Fellow," Buttercup said.
"Neither did I, in truth, but if He didn't exist, I didn't much want to either.
William Goldman
#75. The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.
Emma Goldman
#76. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
William Goldman
#77. I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
Emma Goldman
#78. Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism.
Emma Goldman
#79. Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage. Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.
Emma Goldman
#80. What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!
Emma Goldman
#81. Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals ...
Emma Goldman
#83. Any experience is profitable if you allow it to be, all actions are profitable, no matter how badly you may suffer from them.
William Goldman
#85. Some of the wrong people die. Be ready for it. This isn't Curious George Uses the Potty.
William Goldman
#86. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.
Emma Goldman
#87. The first morning after Westley's departure, Buttercup thought she was entitled to do nothing more than sit around moping and feeling sorry for herself. After all, the love of her life had fled, life had no meaning, how could you face the future, et cetera, et cetera.
William Goldman
#89. I could give you my word as a Spaniard," Inigo said.
"No good," the man in black replied. "I've known too many Spaniards.
William Goldman
#91. When primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature.
Emma Goldman
#92. If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.
Duff Goldman
#93. Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
William Goldman
#94. What is generally regarded as success - acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige - I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished - his development has stopped at that point.
Emma Goldman
#95. Be patient with your boaters and let them rant. Most of them will get over it come December.
Matt Goldman
#96. Sonny, don't you tell me what's worthwhile
true love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. Everybody knows that.
William Goldman
#97. I am not a planner. I follow. Tell me what to do and no man alive does it better. But my mind is like fine wine; it travels badly.
William Goldman
#98. Well, why didn't you list that among our assets in the first place?
William Goldman
#99. Predigested food' should be inscribed over every hall of learning as a warning to all who do not wish to lose their own personalities and their original sense of judgment ...
Emma Goldman
#100. Death of the heart,' the subtitle says, Whose death? And even more important maybe, whose heart?
William Goldman
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