Businesspeople From The United States

"Many economists would have you believe that their field is an objective science. I disagree, and I think that it is equally a tool that humans use to enforce and encode our social and moral preferences and prejudices about status and power, which is why plutocrats like me have always needed to find persuasive stories to tell everyone else about why our relative positions are morally righteous and good for everyone: like, we are indispensable, the job creators, and you are not; like, tax cuts for us create growth, but investments in you will balloon our debt and bankrupt our great country; that we matter; that you don't. For thousands of years, these stories were called divine right. Today, we have trickle-down economics. How obviously, transparently self-serving all of this is."

"Greed is not good. Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath. And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society.... Neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable natural law, when in fact it's social norms and constructed narratives based on pseudoscience. If we truly want a more equitable, more prosperous and more sustainable economy, if we want high-functioning democracies and civil society, we must have a new economics."

"You get that a lot. "If you care so much about taxes, why don't you pay more, and if you care so much about wages, why don't you pay more?" And I could do that. The problem is, it doesn't make that much difference, and I have discovered a strategy that works literally a hundred thousand times better...which is to use my money to build narratives and to pass laws that will require all the other rich people to pay taxes and pay their workers better. And so, for example, the 15-dollar minimum wage that we cooked up [in Seattle) has now affected 30 million workers. So that works better."

"If wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks."

"It was the eyes that did it. [timid giggle] I liked the way he painted eyes and he liked mine."

"He can't paint eyes. He couldn't learn to paint at all."

"But it was a real nightmare when Walter threatened to kill me and our two daughters if we told anyone."

"It takes dispassionate bravado to speak of oneself in the third person. Walter has such bravado: it is one of the chief reasons for his success."

"We don't criticize them, so why criticize Walter Keane just because his symbol of humanity is a child?"

"My psyche was scarred in my art student days in Europe, just after World War II, by an ineradicable memory of war-wracked innocents. In their eyes lurk all of mankind's questions and answers. If mankind would look deep into the soul of the very young, he wouldn't need a road map. I wanted other people to know about those eyes, too. I want my paintings to clobber you in the heart and make you yell, "!""

"He'd threatened me so many times. I thought he was so crazy he could hire a hit man to come get me anytime."

"I don't really care what people think of me. Whatever anyone may say, I've helped the whole art world, just as Picasso and Dalí have. I've made people aware of painting, which makes them buy more, just like they go buy more records and books once they're exposed."

"Well, I first, uh, started doing this after World War II when I was kind of tramping around France, Germany, and the lowlands, and I came upon these frightened, waif-type children, and, uh, they actually looked like rats running around and they acted like it. And, uh, I started painting this type of thing of these chi—these children, they didn't even seem to know why—these children didn't even seem to know how to talk; they couldn't even pray. And it started like, uh, an artist work—it-it does—you don't know how to talk about it, but the painting can talk for you, and I think this is the difference between an artist and a poet and a writer: in other words, an artist, uh, paints what he has to say, where other people do it in, uh, in more verbal type of…"

"Walter was extremely charming. He could charm anybody, especially women."

"Let's face it, nobody could paint eyes like El Greco, and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane."

"I lost all respect for him and myself, and lived in a nightmare."

"You know, when people have no meaning in their lives, they begin to do things that sometimes can be totally crazy."

"If all of a sudden, you couldn't buy an AR-15, what would you lose? Would you feel as though your Second Amendment rights would be eroded because you couldn't buy a God-darn AR-15?"

"Payments have not kept up with the internet. Money works fine in the developed world. The people who actually get screwed are the people who pay 10% remittances or those who can’t get a bank account."

"All the filtered networks in the world won't address the problem of copyright violation if no one is using them and everyone just migrates to the non-filtered networks."

"Internet infrastructure should not be owned by any small group of people."

"The best way to inspire people to superior performance is to convince them by everything you do and by your everyday attitude that you are wholeheartedly supporting them."

"A true leader has to have a genuine open-door policy so that his people are not afraid to approach him for any reason. A man should feel free to tell his chief executive to his face, 'I think you're dead wrong about such and such, and here are my reasons.'"

"The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism."

"Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.."

"In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins; cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later."

"When you have mastered the numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading a book. You will be reading meanings."

"Every company has two organizational structures: the formal one is written on the charts; the other is the everyday living relationship of the men and women in the organization."

"Management manages by making decisions and by seeing that those decisions are implemented."

"I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them. My philosophy is to stay as close as possible to what's happening. If I can't solve something, how the hell can I expect my managers to?"

"I'd hate to spend the rest of my life trying to outwit an eighteen-inch fish."

"It is better to take over and build upon an existing business than to start a new one."

"It is much more difficult to measure non-performance than performance. Performance stands out like a ton of diamonds. Non-performance can almost always be explained away."

"Paul's insight is that the infrastructure for creating new ideas is the engine room of economic growth. So we need to pay attention to patents, the number of scientists that are out there, the incentives to do science. And as long as we can keep generating new ideas, we can keep generating economic growth."

"You cannot run a business, or anything else, on a theory."

"Managers in all too many American companies do not achieve the desired results because nobody makes them do it."

"Presenting a model is like doing a card trick. Everybody knows that there will be some sleight of hand. There is no intent to deceive because no one takes it seriously. Perhaps our norms will soon be like those in professional magic; it will be impolite, perhaps even an ethical breach, to reveal how someone’s trick works."

"Economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material."

"Many people think that dealing with protecting the environment will be so costly and so hard that they just want to ignore the problem. I hope the prize today could help everyone see that humans are capable of amazing accomplishments when we set about trying to do something."

"The question that I first asked was, why was progress . . . speeding up over time? It arises because of this special characteristic of an idea, which is if [a million people try] to discover something, if any one person finds it, everybody can use the idea."

"The amazing thing about cities is that they're worth so much more than it costs to build them."

"You will almost never see an economist whom the academics themselves regard as important or interesting. For example, niether Robert Lucas, without question the most influential economic theorist of the 1970s, nor Paul Romer, arguably the most influential theorist of the 1980s, has ever appeared on any public affairs program."

"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

"Romer demonstrates how knowledge can function as a driver of long-term economic growth. . . . Previous macroeconomic research had emphasised technological innovation as the primary driver of economic growth, but had not modelled how economic decisions and market conditions determine the creation of new technologies. Paul Romer solved this problem by demonstrating how economic forces govern the willingness of firms to produce new ideas and innovations."

"We've maintained accelerating growth over time [in part because of] changes in our institutions. We have things like universities . . . patent laws, [and] research grants which have created incentives for those individuals [who develop innovations] to engage in more discovery. . . . [T]he rules of the game create incentives . . ."

"Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned."

"I will face this challenge with the same energy and determination I've relied on to climb every hill and overcome every obstacle that I've faced in my life."

"Cancer – regardless of the type – is a disease that has touched every one of us through family or friends. It is my hope that in being candid about my battle, that i will raise awareness that will ultimately benefit others."

"I called this press conference today to talk about a new challenge that i will face, a personal one – one that requires me, once again, to be an underdog and a fighter. A few days ago, I was diagnosed with cancer, aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma, to be specific – which is a cancer of the lymph nodes."

"Over the coming months, I'll receive multiple treatments, I'll lose my hair, trim down a bit, but I will not stop working to change Maryland for the better. I'll be working hard, and making the decisions the people of this state elected me to make. … With my faith, family, and friends, I know that I won't just beat this disease but I will be a better and stronger person and governor on the other side."