Sachs Quotes & Sayings

I think there's a fear of difference in American cinema. — Ira Sachs

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

The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. — Curt Sachs

The time has come to end this charade. The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves. Africa should say: 'thank you very much but we need this money to meet the needs of children who are dying right now so we will put the debt servicing payments into urgent social investment in health, education, drinking water, control of AIDS and other needs.' — Jeffrey Sachs

By 1988, I was living in New York myself. — Ira Sachs

In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided they'd borrow a bit more and do even better. — Jeffrey Sachs

Our challenge, our generation's unique challenge, is learning to live peacefully and sustainably in an extraordinarily crowded world. Our planet is crowded to an unprecendented degree. It is bursting at the seams. It's bursting at the seams in human terms, in economic terms, and in ecological terms — Jeffrey Sachs

The United States is absolutely ripe for a rise in gasoline taxes. The nominal gasoline excise tax rate has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1994.29 Inflation alone has reduced the real value of that tax per gallon by around 30 percent. As with other federal tax rates, the U.S. excise tax rate on gasoline is extremely low by international comparison. We might conservatively assume that by 2015 an extra 0.5 percent of GDP could be collected by some combination of a higher gasoline excise tax and modest carbon levies on other fossil fuels (such as on coal at the utilities). Other — Jeffrey D. Sachs

I got into filmmaking in order to tell very personal stories, and in this day and age, the opportunity seems all the more precious. — Ira Sachs

I'm not interested in a film about deceit anymore. I think I was always invested in deceit on some level. But it no longer compels me the way it did for so many years. — Ira Sachs

The idea that UN commitments should be followed by action is indeed a radical one, especially for the United States, where wilful neglect of its own commitments is the rule. — Jeffrey Sachs

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

measures like GDP per person give only a rough reflection of the overall level of wellbeing of an individual or a nation. But for sustainable development we are interested in raising human wellbeing, not just in raising income, still less in a mad race for more riches for people who are already rich. Therefore, it is important to ask how we can best measure wellbeing (or life satisfaction) beyond GDP per capita. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry's purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars' worth of bonds. He'd either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he'd insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn't own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to "insure" it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn't insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market - and this was the second way to think about it. — Michael Lewis

America cut back on "welfare" from the 1970s onward. Family income support fell from 0.4 percent of GDP in 1970 to under 0.2 percent in 2010.16 Welfare still looms large in the public's imagination, but it plays little role in the budget and the deficit. It's been a long time since America was generous to its poor families with children! The — Jeffrey D. Sachs

You can be aware of the passing of time without being nostalgic. — Ira Sachs

Sustainability, or fairness to the future, therefore involves the concept of stewardship, the idea that the living generation must be stewards of the earth's resources for the generations that will come later. That's a tough role to play. There is nothing natural or innate about it. We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will. Yet those are our descendants and our fellow humanity. Alas, it's a role that we've mostly ignored till now, to the increasing peril of all who will follow. The — Jeffrey D. Sachs

The rich control our politics to a huge extend. In return they get tax cuts and deregulation. It's been and is an amazing ride for the rich. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

Severability is an important concept in the context of the relations between this Court and Parliament; like 'reading down', it is an instrument of judicial restraint which reduces the danger of producing an overbroad judicial reaction to overbroad legislation. — Albie Sachs

Rhythmic motion has become the carrier and creator of almost every ecstatic mood of any significance in human life. — Curt Sachs

At the most basic level, the key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. — Jeffrey Sachs

Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York. — Ira Sachs

We need the rich today to do their modest part to enable all of society to share in prosperity. By passing that hurdle, we would reduce the need for long-term transfers from rich to poor in the future. The — Jeffrey D. Sachs

I realize I have strength as an artist and professional by embracing my difference instead of what makes me the same. — Ira Sachs

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

Nothing is forever, if you have enough power tools. — Albie Sachs

In truth, it's not the shareholders of the American International Group who benefited most from its bailout; they were mostly wiped out. The great beneficiaries have been the creditors and counterparties at the other end of A.I.G.'s derivatives deals - firms like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, Barclays and UBS. — Tyler Cowen

You want to run out in front, prepare to be tripped from behind. — Albie Sachs

I've made four films about the destructive nature of relationships, of secrets and lies, and I think I'm no longer interested in that subject - which is a wonderful relief. — Ira Sachs

Our interconnectedness on the planet is the dominating truth of the 21st century. One stark result is that the world's poor live, and especially die, with the awareness that the United States is doing little to mobilise the weapons of mass salvation that could offer them survival, dignity and eventually the escape from poverty. — Jeffrey Sachs

The dirty little secret of what used to be known as Wall Street securities firms-Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns-was that every one of them funded their business in this way to varying degress, and every one of them was always just twenty-four hours away from a funding crisis. The key to day-to-day survival was the skill with which Wall Street executives managed their firms' ongoing reputation in the marketplace ... — William D. Cohan

Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government's true level of indebtedness. For these trades Goldman Sachs - which, in effect, handed Greece a $1 billion loan - carved out a reported $300 million in fees. — Michael Lewis

father figure to Jobs. REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor. MIKE MURRAY. Early Macintosh marketing director. PAUL OTELLINI. CEO of Intel who helped switch the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get the iPhone business. LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford — Walter Isaacson

LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs's Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs's father figure. JONATHAN "RUBY" RUBINSTEIN. Worked — Walter Isaacson

As a filmmaker, you realize that places have character based on their history as much as a face does or an actor does. — Ira Sachs

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age. — Ira Sachs

History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves. — Jeffrey Sachs

My ideal weight is moobless. — Albie Sachs

Two-hundred forty horsepower isn't enough to move me anymore. Enough to move my body, yes, but not my soul. — Albie Sachs

If you have a lot of short-term debt, it means that all of that money can be demanded in a very short period of time. Technically, short-term debt means money that's coming due within a year. Typically, it means money that's coming due within 30 to 90 days. — Jeffrey Sachs

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

We are not at war (except with our own demons). — Jeffrey Sachs

We, being the Western world, wouldn't let Russia off the hook on debt. So there were demands on debt servicing in the early days until they ran out of reserves. There was no real aid program, just a fictional aid program. — Jeffrey Sachs

Mysterious can be cool, if you're in Hollywood and everyone's happy. But it can be really bad if people perceive that the financial interests are adversarial, that there's money versus people. A lot of Goldman Sachs people went into government, so at a time when there's a distrust of institutions, some of that reflects on us. — Lloyd Blankfein

We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy. — Jeffrey Sachs

By 15, I was lucky enough to find the theater. — Ira Sachs

The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet. — Jeffrey Sachs

Apple raised $17 billion in a bond offering in 2013. Not to invest in new products or business lines, but to pay a dividend to stockholders. The company is awash with cash, but much of that money is overseas, and there would be a tax charge if it were repatriated to the USA. For many other companies, the tax-favoured status of debt relative to equity encourages financial engineering. Most large multinational companies have corporate and financial structures of mind-blowing complexity. The mechanics of these arrangements, which are mainly directed at tax avoidance or regulatory arbitrage, are understood by only a handful of specialists. Much of the securities issuance undertaken by Goldman Sachs was not 'helping companies to grow' but represented financial engineering of the kind undertaken at Apple. What — John Kay

The normal reaction to tasks that overwhelm us, either because we cannot see how we can ever finish them, or because the level of difficulty is way beyond us, is frustration. Frustration breeds procrastination and welcomes distractions. — Helmut Sachs

People like Mike McConnell don't really move from public office to the private sector and back again; that implies more separation than actually exists. Rather, the U.S. government and industry interests essentially form one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity - with a public division and a private one. When someone like McConnell goes from a top private sector position to a top government post in the same field, it's more like an intracorporate reassignment than it is like changing employers. When McConnell serves as DNI he's simply in one division of this entity, and when he's at Booz Allen he is in another. It's precisely the same way that Goldman Sachs officials endlessly move in and out of the Treasury Department and other government positions with financial authority, or the way that health care and oil executives move in and out of government agencies charged with regulating those fields. In — Glenn Greenwald

It's the American leadership that has not played the role it should be playing and that leaders in other countries have been playing. — Jeffrey Sachs

Once we acquired the power to destroy ourselves, the very notion of human life had been altered; even the air we breathed was contaminated with the stench of death. Sachs was hardly the first person to come up with this idea, but considering what happened to him nine days ago, there's a certain eeriness to the obsession, as if it were a kind of deadly pun, a mixed-up word that took root inside him and proliferated beyond his control. — Paul Auster

If there is a true measure of a person's soul, if there is a single gauge of real divinity, of how beautifully a fellow human honors this life, has genuine spiritual fire and is full of honest love and compassion, it has to be right there, in the eyes.
The Dalai Lama's eyes sparkle and dance with laughter and unbridled love. The Pope's eyes are dark and glazed, bleak as obsidian marbles. Pat Robertson's eyes are rheumy and hollow, like tiny potholes of old wax. Goldman Sachs cretins, well, they don't use their own eyes at all; they just steal someone else's. — Mark Morford

Everyone wants to belong, and everyone needs to belong in order to make a career on some level. — Ira Sachs

We're not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together to understand what this is all about ... People matter more than Wall Street. — Newt Gingrich

The peoples influenced by the animal dance have a variety of movements and dance with enthusiasm; those who do not know the animal dance have few movements and show little zest for dancing. — Curt Sachs

humans have a profound ability both to cooperate and nurture and to shun others and fight.8 In our advanced technological age, with the capacity of our weapons to end human life, our ability to master our baser emotions and channel them toward constructive and cooperative outcomes will provide the basis for our survival. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

For me, every film is actually a form of documentary. — Ira Sachs

I want labor to be the point, because everything in our lives is miraculously made with no idea of how it's done. As an active and critical consumer, and as someone who has attempted to make the flawless and failed, I wanted a transparency of construction here. If we know how it is made and how it falls apart, we will know how to rebuild it. — Tom Sachs

The supposition that there is massive waste to be cut in the civilian budget is simply a myth. To recapitulate: ending all earmarks and foreign aid and achieving all of the specific cuts on civilian programs proposed by the deficit commission, even if such choices were meritorious, would amount to less than 1 percent of GDP. True — Jeffrey D. Sachs

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

I think it's interesting: What is the generational effect of the experience of being a gay person in America? For my generation, it was very difficult. — Ira Sachs

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

It is easy to lose sight of the ultimate purpose of economic policy: the life satisfaction of the population. That ultimate goal should be unassailable for a country founded precisely to defend the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

Soil mapping is one of the pillars to the challenge of sustainable development — Jeffrey Sachs

our common humanity made it possible to find common cause in the midst of competition and that peace depended on our own virtue and ethical behavior. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

When the political and economic situation is as dangerous as it is today, cynicism and loss of time are far more dangerous than they look. History plays cruel tricks on the unserious. American political leaders have been in an unserious mood for years, unwilling to level with the American people. The — Jeffrey D. Sachs

Devaluations are never easy. — Jeffrey Sachs

The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority
whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional
rather than an accident of timing or geography. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

Without community events like NewFest, I don't think we'd have a queer cinema in America. — Ira Sachs

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

With an operating profit margin topping 40 percent, Fanuc makes 25 percent more income per employee than Goldman Sachs, — Anonymous

Basic survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn't cost much, but showing off does.3 For — Jeffrey D. Sachs

Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, 'were always lost, because they'd never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way. — Rebecca Solnit

You have to look at people now that were members of the Klu Klux Klan or whatever else and now are trying to rewrite their personal histories to tell that they've always been tolerant. It's not peculiar to want to sanitize what you did. — Ruth Hanna Sachs

We've taken the view that if the rest of the world would democratize and create market economies, that would spread the benefits of prosperity around the world, and that it would enhance our own prosperity, and our own stability and security, as well. — Jeffrey Sachs

Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn't have been possible for him to remember where he had begun. — Paul Auster

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

This is our greatest challenge: learning to live in a crowded and interconnected world that is creating unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment. — Jeffrey Sachs

As a gay person, my life has been marginalized. — Ira Sachs

The longer you wait, the less fun. If you wait until the bitter end, the whole economy can be destroyed. — Jeffrey Sachs

We have entered a new era. Global society is interconnected as never before. [...] I suggest that we have arrived in the Age of Sustainable Development. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

Art museums are little more than big buildings where rectangular old men, hung on the walls by their backs, wait for young people to come stand in front of them. — Adam Ehrlich Sachs

The adult who puts his arm around his companion in the ballroom, and the child in the roadway, skipping in a round dance - they forget themselve, they dissolve the weight of earthly contact and the rigidity of daily existence. The soul slips into a twilight stage. — Curt Sachs

I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell. — Ira Sachs

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling. — Ira Sachs

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

I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way. — Ira Sachs

The superhuman power which exhiliration and hypnosis bring to a dancer is shown especially clearly in his almost inconceivable staying powers in a state of high tension. "In the dance even the weakest can do wonders." — Curt Sachs

I try to keep feeling what's going on and try to use the camera, the actors and the design to enhance those feelings. There's something really emotionally direct and honest about how I put the material with the images. You hope that the strength of mise-en-scene comes from an honesty towards the material. You also hire really well. — Ira Sachs

Whatever the nature of dance, it needs no onlooker, not even a single witness. — Curt Sachs

What I loved about 'Goodfellas' is that it's a film about bad behavior - but told with great energy and without judgment - but it doesn't actually shy away from the consequences of that behavior in the characters' lives, which I think is similar in 'Keep the Lights On.' — Ira Sachs

Fighting bitterness can be a full-time job. — Ira Sachs

We breathed the air of freedom without knowing the language or any person. — Nelly Sachs

White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues. — Jeffrey Sachs

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

The rich do not have to invest enough in the poorest countries to make them rich; they need to invest enough so that these countries can get their foot on the economic ladder ... Economic development works. It can be successful. It tends to build on itself. But it must get started. — Jeffrey Sachs

Let's start fresh with Russia on some real help and some real reform. — Jeffrey Sachs