Old Wall Street Quotes & Sayings

You fucked-up hunk. — James Purdy

Set forth no limits, keep in mind that your potential is boundless. — Sal Martinez

Another, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, suggests I need to change my Facebook photo to something that makes me look younger. I scan an old photo from my First Communion and make it my profile photo. There I am, age eight, wearing my First Communion robe, hands folded in prayer in front of me, looking angelic. "I'm trying to get a promotion at HubSpot," I write. "The 8-year-old version of me has lots of ideas about how to expand geographically while also driving up MRR by pushing into the enterprise. — Dan Lyons

We have seen that in this country in the last few years, particularly on Wall Street, with the rise of the old human frailty of greed. This occurs when people begin to serve only their own needs to the detriment of everyone else. — Lee R. Raymond

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees - BLOOD. — Charles Dickens

I'm red as a berry, shiny from the pickling of the womb, and squinting at the world through suspicious, slitted eyes. — Karen Joy Fowler

The underlying factor here is the tendency of the security markets to undervalue issues that are involved in any sort of complicated legal proceedings. An old Wall Street motto has been: "Never buy into a lawsuit." This may be sound advice to the speculator seeking quick action on his holdings. But the adoption of this attitude by the general public is bound to create bargain opportunities in the securities affected by it, since the prejudice against them holds their prices down to unduly low levels.* — Benjamin Graham

He doesn't know what the world is like today. The thought that his own conception of the world was so different from his father's was like a protecting wall around his entire being. When his father went out into the street he had only the mosque, the Koran, the other old men in his mind. It was the immutable world of law, the written word, unchanging beneficence, but it was in some way wrinkled and dried up. Whereas when Amar stepped out the door there was the whole vast earth waiting, the live mysterious earth, that belonged to him in a way it could belong to no one else, and where anything at all might happen. — Paul Bowles

Virtue, for us, is obedience to God in Christ. — Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

The old Soviet culture also left its former citizens oddly prepared for Wall Street in the early twenty-first century. The Soviet-controlled economy was horrible and complicated but riddled with loopholes. Everything was scarce; everything was also gettable, if you knew how to get it. "We had this system for seventy years," said Constantine. "People learn to work around the system. The more you cultivate a class of people who know how to work around the system, the more people you will have who know how to do it well. All of the Soviet Union for seventy years were people who are skilled at working around the system. — Michael Lewis

I'm not saying I'm some high priestess. I do things, I'm sure, that are damaging, but it's certainly not on purpose. — Sandra Bernhard

Critics of the Wall Street protesters claim that they have old ideas, nothing new, and they're never going to work. Wait a minute., that sounds like this show. — David Letterman

Legal declaration by God through Jesus Christ! — John Paul Warren

In 1999, the anthropologist Christopher Boehm addressed this issue in Hierarchy in the Forest, which reviewed the lifestyles of dozens of small-scale human groups. Perhaps surprisingly, he found that they are egalitarian. Material inequality is kept to a minimum; goods are distributed to everyone. The old and sick are cared for. There are leaders, but their power is kept in check; and the social structure is flexible and nonhierarchical. It looks less like Stalin's Russia and more like Occupy Wall Street. — Paul Bloom

One of the reasons Wall Street had cooked up this new industry called structured finance was that its old-fashioned business was every day less profitable. The profits in stockbroking, along with those in the more conventional sorts of bond broking, had been squashed by Internet competition. — Michael Lewis

I've been on Wall Street once in my life in 1980 as a tourist. I went to see the stock exchange when I was 18 years old. I'm not a Wall Street lawyer, I'm a Stanwix Street lawyer. Stanwix Street is a street in downtown Pittsburgh. — Keith Rothfus

But there's a difference between an old-fashioned financial panic and what had happened on Wall Street in 2008. In an old-fashioned panic, perception creates its own reality: Someone shouts "Fire!" in a crowded theater and the audience crushes each other to death in its rush for the exits. On Wall Street in 2008 the reality finally overwhelmed perceptions: A crowded theater burned down with a lot of people still in their seats. Every major firm on Wall Street was either bankrupt or fatally intertwined with a bankrupt system. The problem wasn't that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. The problem was that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to succeed. This — Michael Lewis

If you were meant to fly, not even running really fast is that impressive. — Erwin McManus

I speak to kids 16, 17 years old, they haven't read a newspaper. They haven't physically handled a newspaper. They don't even look at the headlines on a subway. These kids are on the Internet and the level of news that they're getting is not the quality of 'The New York Times' or 'The Wall Street Journal.' It's way deficient, and they don't care. — Harvey Weinstein

Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose. The parents just shook their heads and smiled. I've made a big investment in you, Peter. Time and money, and it's not working. Now, I could just shake my head and smile. But in my house, when a turd appears, we throw it out. We dispose of it. We flush it away. We don't put it on the table and call it caviar. — Tom Wolfe

I tell my friends married life is boring, but that's just a fun thing to say to make single people feel better. — Sarah Jessica Parker

But women are coming into Wall Street in large numbers - and they still are not making partner and are not getting into the positions that lead to the executive suites. There's still an old-boy network. You just have to keep fighting. — Muriel Siebert

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx. — James Baldwin

I went to see the stock exchange when I was 18 years old. I'm not a Wall Street lawyer, I'm a Stanwix Street lawyer. Stanwix Street is a street in downtown Pittsburgh. One of the clients is Mellon Bank, which merged with the Bank of New York Mellon a number of years ago. And I have for years have done software licensing for Mellon. — Keith Rothfus

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? — Michael Lewis

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper's, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day's head into the base motor pool. — Ben Fountain

A pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street (a community in which quality control is not prized) will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest — Warren Buffett

There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. — Jesse Lauriston Livermore

The closest most people have ever come to understanding what an investment banker does may have been on October 24, 1995, when they heard the outrageous special interest story of the day. The wire services released the story first. It was quickly picked up and parroted by almost every major media outlet in the country as a classic example of Wall Street excess. A fifty-eight-year-old frustrated managing director from Trust Company of the West, on an airplane trip from Buenos Aires to New York City, downed an excessive number of cocktails, got out of his seat in the first-class cabin of a United Airlines flight, dropped his pants, and took a crap
on the service cart. There you have it. That's what bankers do: consume, process, and disseminate. — Peter Troob

Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy. — Michael Pollan

I was walking up and down the rows of books at the antiquarian bookseller's in Karlova Street. Now and then I would take a look out the shop window. It started to snow heavily; holding a book in my hand I watched the snowflakes swirling in front of the wall of St Savior's Church. I returned to my book, savoring its aroma and allowing my eyes to flit over its pages, reading here and there the fragment of a sentence that suddenly sparkled mysteriously because it was taken out of context. I was in no hurry; I was happy to be in a room that smelled pleasantly of old books, where it was warm and quiet, where the pages rustled as they were turned, as if the books were sighing in their sleep. I was glad I didn't have to go out into the darkness and the snowstorm. — Wieslaw Mysliwski

When I was 15 years old, I read an article about Ivan Boesky, the well-known takeover trader - turned out years later it was all on inside information! But before that came to light, he was very successful, very flamboyant. And I thought, 'This is what I want to do.' So I'm 15 years old, I decide I'm going to Wall Street. — Karen Finerman

The old Wall Street adage "never invest in anything that eats or needs repairs" may apply to racehorses, but it's malarkey when it comes to houses. — Peter Lynch

If you were born in 1950 and were in the top ten percent, everything got better for twenty years automatically. Then, after the late sixties, you went to a good grad school, and you got a good job on Wall Street in the late seventies, and then you hit the boom. Your story has been one of incredible, unrelenting progress for sixty years. Most people who are sixty years old in the U.S. - not their story at all." The establishment had been coasting for a long time and was out of answers. Its failure pointed to new directions, maybe Marxist, maybe libertarian, along a volatile trajectory that it could no longer control. — George Packer

Konig couldn't help but think of the man as a slab of walking muscle with all the intellect of a pair of cheap shoes. — Michael R. Fletcher

Who doesn't love the parables? You know there's a solution, but you have to do some work to find it. — John Bytheway

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it 'Christmas' and went to church; the Jews called it 'Hanukkah' and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say 'Merry Christmas!' or 'Happy Hanukkah!' or (to the atheists) 'Look out for the wall! — Dave Barry

It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it's amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving Arabs could ever be refuted. So if you didn't know why the dollar was falling, you shouted out something about Arabs. — Michael Lewis

The primary goal I set for myself on how I define what success looks like for me is am I working at a company that matters? Am I working with somebody who I think affects positive change? Am I providing a benefit to my family? Am I enjoying myself? Why would I put a limitation on my enjoyment? There is an old view on Wall Street that says, 'They love you until they don't.' I am going to stay happy until I am not. — Dan Rosensweig

I personally prefer working digitally because it allows me to work quickly and cleanly. I don't have to buy paint or brushes or canvases, I don't have to wait for paintings to dry before sending them to clients, I don't have to photograph or scan my final work, and I can make edits immediately and easily. — Julie Dillon

No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn't stop for your grief. — Faraaz Kazi

Many thrifts layered a billion dollars of brand-new loans on top of their existing, disastrous hundred million dollars of old loss-making loans, in a hope that the new would offset the old. Each new purchase of mortgage bonds (which was identical to making a loan) was like the last act of a desperate man. The strategy was wildly irresponsible, for the fundamental problem (borrowing short term and lending long term) hadn't been remedied. The hypergrowth only meant that the next thrift crisis would be larger. But the thrift managers were not thinking that far in advance. They were simply trying to keep the door to the shop open. That explains why thrifts continued to buy mortgage bonds even as they sold their loans. — Michael Lewis