Businesspeople From The United States

"What good is the moon if you can't buy or sell it?"

"Greed is all right, by the way. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."

"This guy has emotional problems."

"When it comes to formulating drug policy, too frequently lawmakers are allowed to simply ignore evidence-and even make up their own. I can't count the number of times I've seen shameless politicians use this strategy to mislead the public about drugs. Take for example, former speaker of the house John Boehner, who opposed marijuana legalization for his entire thirty-year political career. Back in 2011, he wrote a constituent to say "research shows that marijuana use in its raw form is harmful" and that he was "unalterably opposed to the legalization of marijuana." In 2018, following Boehner's 2015 resignation from Congress, he joined the board of Acreage Holdings, a Canadian firm that is the largest multi-state owner of cannabis licenses and assets in the United States. As you might've guessed, Boehner no longer opposes marijuana legalization. Now he's an advocate. Now he believes that laws prohibiting the substance are "way out of step." Boehner is a hypocrite. Don't misunderstand me, I think marijuana should be legalized nationwide. My position is unequivocal. What's more, I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for those who are able to change their minds in the presence of new and better evidence. This is called cognitive flexibility, a hallmark of intelligence. Boehner's newfound position, however, was motivated by greed. He doesn't seem to give one fuck about the extensive harms caused by the prohibitory policies he once supported. These policies compromise the health of synthetic cannabinoid users and facilitate racism in law enforcement. "I don't have any regrets at all," Boehner told National Public Radio. Astonishingly, he said, "The whole criminal justice part of this, frankly, it never crossed my mind.""

"Lucifer in the flesh, I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life."

"I leave with no regrets or burdens. If anything, I leave as I started; just a regular guy humbled by the chance to do a big job."

"We lost one of one of the great leaders of our lifetime on Monday. She was a true friend of America, and a champion of freedom. We're going to ensure that Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is honored by the United States government in a way commensurate with her enormous achievements."

"Just because you have a right to do something in America does not mean it is the right thing to do."

"If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, it would be Christmas everyday."

"What we really expect out of the Democrats is for them to treat us as they would like to have been treated."

"The major enemy of poker players is their rationalizations for their failures to think....Many poor players evade thinking by letting their minds sink into irrational fogs. Their belief in luck short-circuits their minds by excusing them from their responsibility to think. Belief in luck is a great mystical rationalization for the refusal to think."

"Business is the highest evolution of consciousness, responsibility, and morality. No other living organism is even remotely able to function on a business level. The essences of business are honesty, effort, responsibility, integration, abstraction, conceptualization, objectivity, long-range planning, discipline, thought, control. Business creates essentially every major human value, ranging from the development of consciousness, language, mathematics, the arts, up to the electronic and biogenic revolutions."

"May we gain the time needed to succeed."

"Finally, let me explain why this De la Rosa World Summit is the last Neo-Tech summit -- and why that may be the best news. But, first, I want to hail whom I believe to be the most genuinely-happy spirit in today’s anticivilization -- a beautiful person who brings to us her happiness made from the love of life as we travel toward the Civilization of the Universe. Let us emblazon our own spirits by remembering this lovely beam of light -- this enduring beacon of joy, this amazingly-wonderful person -- our free-spirit Summit impresario, Rosa María Wallace. ...What a woman!"

"From China to America to Mecca, forget mandates from Heaven, Jesus, or God. They do not exist. An a-priori mandate, however, does exist from metaphorical Zons here on Earth and across the cosmos."

"Could I begin life again, knowing what I know now, and had money to invest, I would buy every foot of land on the island of Manhattan."

"The first hundred thousand—that was hard to get; but afterwards it was easy to make more."

"I think about how angry I was that my dad didn't take better care of himself. How he never went to a doctor, let himself become grossly overweight, smoked three packs a day, drank like a fish and never exercised. But then I think about how his colleague mentioned that, days before dying, my dad had said he lived a good life and that he was satisfied. I realize that there is a certain value in my father's way of life. He ate, smoked and drank as he pleased, and one day he just suddenly and quickly died. Given some of the other choices I'd witnessed, it turns out that enjoying yourself and then dying quickly is not such a hard way to go."

"My father, Hugh Everett, III, author of the Many Worlds Theory, was a quiet man during the eighteen or so years I shared a house with him. Turns out he was depressed over a sad childhood and then being dismissed as a kook, only later - too late - to be recognized as a genius."

"Someone once noted that Hugh Everett should have been declared a "national resource," and given all the time and resources he needed to develop new theories."

"If you want to get an interesting perspective do not think of Hugh as a traditional 20th century physicist but more of a Renaissance man with interests and skills in many different areas. He was smart and lots of things interested him and he brought the same general conceptual methodology to solve them. The subject matter was not so important as the solution ideas."

"Hugh Everett's work has been described by many people in terms of many worlds, the idea being that every one of the various alternative histories, branching histories, is assigned some sort of reality."

"[The Many-worlds interpretation is the] only completely coherent approach to explaining both the contents of quantum mechanics and the appearance of the world."

"The physical "reality" is assumed to be the wave function of the whole universe itself."

"As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree."

"Quantum mechanics is reformulated, in a way which eliminates its present dependence on the special treatment of observation of a system by an external observer."

"In the great desert of northern Arizona the traveller, threading his way across a sage-brush and cacti plain shut in by abrupt-sided shelves of land rising here and there some hundreds of feet higher, suddenly comes upon a petrified forest."

"So far as thought may peer into the past, the epic of our solar system began with a great catastrophe. Two suns met. What had been, ceased; what was to be, arose. Fatal to both progenitors, the event dated a stupendous cosmic birth."

"War is a survival among us from savage times and affects now chiefly the boyish and unthinking element of the nation. The wisest realize that there are better ways for practicing heroism and other and more certain ends of insuring the survival of the fittest. It is something a people outgrow. But whether they consciously practice peace or not, nature in its evolution eventually practices it for them, and after enough of the inhabitants of a globe have killed each other off, the remainder must find it more advantageous to work together for the common good."

"That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what these beings may be."

"Formulae are the anaesthetics of thought, not its stimulants and to make any one think is far better worth while than cramming him with ill-considered, and therefore indigestible, learning."

"The whole object of science is to synthesize, and so simplify; and did we but know the uttermost of a subject we could make it singularly clear."

"Are physical forces alone at work there, or has evolution begotten something more complex, something not unakin to what we know on Earth as life?"

"My name has been associated with that of Mr. Jay Gould and others in connection with the speculation, and gross injustice has been done me thereby.… You have my authority for stating that I consider Mr. Jay Gould a damned villain."

"Each generation repeats its leaders. Each sees men endowed with superior inventiveness, energy, and genius for business, inspired by love of power and possession, launch selfish schemes-Carnegies, Rockefellers, Goulds…Each generation has had its Henry George, its Bellamy, its Bryan, intent on persuading mankind that he had found the way, could lead men to the good life. In each generation employer and employee have faced the decision-war or cooperation."

"One of the most important factors in his execution of a deal was concealing from others even the intimation of what he was going to do. In these accomplishments he never professed a regard for truthfulness. He was quite indifferent to the moral question of misleading people."

"All his gold speculations, his stock speculations—I speak of those which were purely speculative as brokers use the term—generally resulted in losses.… He did not make money … out of those crises of 1869, 1873 and the Erie manipulations of 1868, which have been most strongly condemned."

"One of the most sinister figures that ever flitted, bat-like, across the vision of the American people"

"I do not believe that since man was in the habit of living on this planet anyone has ever lived possessed of the impudence of Jay Gould."

"Gould, with his seventy millions, was one of the colossal failures of our time. He was a purely selfish man. His greed consumed his charity. He was like death and hell - gathering in all, giving back nothing. To build up an immense fortune for one's self by fraud is a disgrace to the age, a mockery to virtue, a menace to public welfare. The love of money was the root of all evil in him. The motive that softens the footsteps of the burglar, that nerves the arm of the highwayman, was the same that prompted Gould to break his neighbor up to build himself up."

"During the war of the rebellion Gould's firm did a large business in railway securities, and also made a great deal of money speculating in gold. Gould had private sources of information in the field, and he was able to turn almost every success or defeat of the Union army to profitable account."

"He was never a stock gambler. He had no more to do with Black Friday than you had."

"I have always found, even to the most trivial detail, that Mr. Gould lived up to the whole nature of his obligations. Of course he was always careful and reticent about what he promised, but that promise was invariably fulfilled."

"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

"I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall Street men are fond of company and sport. A man makes one hundred thousand dollars there and immediately buys a yacht, begins to race fast horses, and becomes a sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and books of my library. Every man has natural inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to make me particularly popular in Wall Street, and I cannot help that."

"I never notice what is said about me. I am credited with things I have never done, and abused for them. It would be idle to attempt to contradict newspaper talk and street rumors."

"No man can control Wall Street. Wall Street is like the ocean. No man can govern it. It is too vast. Wall Street is full of eddies and currents. The thing to do is to watch them, to exercise a little common sense, and … to come out on top."

"Corporations are going, we are told, to destroy the country. But what would this country be but for corporations? Who have developed it? Corporations. Who transact the most marvelous business the world has ever seen? Corporations."

"My idea is, that if capital and labor are left alone they will mutually regulate each other. People who think they can regulate all mankind and get wrong ideas which they believe to be panaceas for every ill cause much trouble to both employers and employees by their interference."

"I judge property myself by its net earning power; that is the only rule I have been able to get.… This whole island Manhattan] was once bought for a few strings of beads. But now you will find this property valued by its earning power, by its rent power, and that is the way to value a railroad or telegraph."