Billionaires Quotes

Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars. ~ Warren Buffett

The rich people are apparently leaving America. They're giving up their citizenship. These great lovers of America who made their money in this country-when you ask them to pay their fair share of taxes they run abroad. We have 19-year old kids who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan defending this country. They went abroad. Not to escape taxes. They're working class kids who died in wars and now billionaires want to run abroad to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. What patriotism! What love of country! ~ Bernie Sanders

The mistake the apartheid government made was they gave the black people nothing, so they had nothing to lose. But now a lot of the former freedom-fighters are big-time capitalists. They've been given directorships in every major company. They're billionaires! ~ Wilbur Smith

Have you seen a copy of Tax Tips for Billionaires? ~ David Letterman

As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids. ~ Peter Diamandis

For billionaires who cannot buy good press, there is the option of buying the press. ~ William Finnegan

Did we ever plan on being billionaires? No, but we wanted to be millionaires. ~ Diane Hendricks

There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place. If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose? ~ Bill Maris

The big guys like Google weren't always big. Once they were two kids in a garage. Or a dorm room. Some of them set out to be billionaires from the get-go, but some of them didn't. Some of them got just caught up in solving an interesting problem, which happened to be worth billions later. ~ Lee Child

The movers and shakers on our planet, aren't the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalising. ~ Bill McKibben

You can be a They and be a billionaire. Not all billionaires are happy and fulfilled. My whole thing is, add value to whoever you meet. Sometimes, the value is just being happy and loving, giving an extra couple of moments to look someone in the eye. Nothing replaces authentic feeling and emotion. ~ Tony Robbins

No matter what your political persuasion, you can find a guide that makes it quick, easy and painless to exercise your right to vote. Wanna know what a certain proposition put forth by a cadre of undisclosed billionaires which cuts funding for public education, arts and infrastructure means? Use the voting guide! ~ Steven Weber

Terry took the silence as acquiescence, "The other way to make money is to exploit people, oh, no sorry, that's the 'only' way to make money, exploit other people, that's how the billionaires have acquired all their money by exploiting others… So how did they achieve it? You're going to love this… they changed all the rules to accommodate what they wanted to do. How I hear you ask… easy, they own the politicians, they own the banks, they own industry and they own everything. They made it easier for themselves to invest in so called emerging markets. What once would've been considered treasonous was now considered virtuous. Instead of building up the nation state and its resources, all of its resources, including its people, they concentrated on building up their profits. That's all they did. They invested in parts of the world where children could be worked for 12 hours a day 7 days a week, where grown men and women could be treated like slaves and all for a pittance and they did this because we here in the west had made it illegal to work children, because we'd abolished slavery, because we had fought for workers' rights, for a minimum wage, for a 40 hr week, for pensions, for the right to retire, for a free NHS, for free education, all of these things were getting in the way of them making a quick and easy profit and worse …had been making us feel we were worth something. ~ Arun D. Ellis

When billionaires can give $50 million, $500 million to a campaign, and there's no limit, then it makes a mockery of 'one man, one vote.' ~ George Takei

I'm more interested in photographing people who have done something, like writers or directors - even billionaires - as long as I can study them before I photograph them. ~ Francesco Carrozzini

Never before has anyone figured out how to rent out American foreign policy, how to convert the position of secretary of state into a personal money machine. Hillary, with Bill's help, figured out not only how to shake down Russian oligarchs and Canadian billionaires by offering them control of America's uranium assets; she also figured out how to rob the island nation of Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. It's one thing to rip off the world's rich; it takes a special kind of chutzpah to steal from the poorest of the poor. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

It is hard to sell Congress and the American people on foreign aid. Is it harder to do that than it is to sell billionaires on the idea that they should give all their money away. ~ Bill Gates

How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. [ca. 1906] ~ Edmund Morris

In effect, two men - excuse me, two billionaires - turned a United States senator 180 degrees merely by threatening to spend big money. And they did it so brazenly that Senator Moran had to publicly humiliate himself to satisfy the brothers' demand....
My sympathy level for anyone who gives in to this kind of pressure is exactly zero. If my job ever depends on pleasing a couple of billionaires, I'll quit. ~ Elizabeth Warren

It was better with the subs than it was with the gold diggers or the hookers. These were real people, with real lives, real jobs, real hearts. It meant something when they submitted to my demands. It meant trust, and trust meant love. I got that
I mean, I understood that. And, oh, Lisa, how I needed that - but I didn't know how to deal. I was too broken. ~ A. Violet End

I think what the American people are saying is enough is enough. This country, this great country, belongs to all of us. It cannot continue to be controlled by a handful of billionaires who apparently want it all. ~ Bernie Sanders

I agreed with everything he was saying when he ran for president. I was listening to what he said. I go, this guy thinks like me and I agree with him. Now he's changing. All he keeps saying is millionaires and billionaires don't pay their fair share of taxes. ~ Jon Lovitz

There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws.
That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don't know how. Or we believe that bad things won't happen to us.
And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler's murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia's icy wasteland - into the Soviet Army's machine guns and cannon - to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor.
Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons' lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush's shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers' coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers' sacrifice. And so she invited the press to ~ David Zindell

I think the latest estimates were that we have about 250,000 millionaires and billionaires. President Obama wants to increase their taxes 13 percent. ~ Joe Walsh

The point is change can come about, but it only comes about when millions of people are actively involved in political struggle, the billionaires may have the money, but we have the people. ~ Bernie Sanders

I want to score this book 10. - Kazkgb
Billionaire's Indulgence #1 ~ Scarlett Avery

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out.
That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Just ten of the Jewish billionaires on this Earth have more than enough to transform the occupied territories into heaven. We can put the 'pal' back in Palestinian. ~ Roseanne Barr

There is no reason that billionaires should crowd us out from our democracy. ~ Martin O'Malley

The billionaires pay an effective tax rate lower than nurses or truck drivers. That makes no sense at all. There has to be real tax reform, and the wealthiest and large corporations will pay. ~ Bernie Sanders

We need to expand Social Security to prevent the looming retirement crisis, and we can do it simply by asking billionaires to pay their fair share. ~ Robert Reich

I want millionaires and billionaires and Big Oil companies to pay their fair share. ~ Elizabeth Warren

The gap between rich and poor is widening dramatically. There's a hangar at the Cairo airport for private jets, billionaires are on the Forbes list, and Egypt's annual per-capita income is two thousand dollars. How can you sustain that? ~ Mohamed ElBaradei

It's harder now for journalists to do stories about billionaires, like Peter Thiel, without having at the back of their minds the fear that maybe somebody deep-pocketed, you know, with limited resources is going to come after us and can my organization afford to defend me? ~ Nick Denton

Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own. ~ Naomi Klein

Let's restore sanity and fairness to the tax cut conversation. We simply cannot afford to hand over the bank vault to our nation's millionaires and billionaires while the middle class picks up spare change. ~ Paul Tonko

One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The Billionaires' Indulgence series is addicting and a heck of a wild ride! ~ Scarlett Avery

The Ragamuffin rabble are the unsung assembly of saved sinners who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness before God, and who cast themselves on His mercy. Startled by the extravagant love of God, they do not require success, fame, wealth, or power to validate their worth. Their spirit transcends all distinctions between the powerful and powerless, educated and illiterate, billionaires and bag ladies, high-tech geeks and low-tech nerds, males and females, the circus and the sanctuary. ~ Brennan Manning

Our parents and grandparents understood this truth deeply. They believed - as we do - that to create jobs, a modern economy requires modern investments: educating, innovating and rebuilding for our children's future. Building an economy to last, from the middle class up, not from the billionaires down. ~ Martin O'Malley

You've worked hard all your life. You've paid Medicare taxes for almost 30 years. But under the Republican plan, Medicare won't be there for you. Instead of Medicare as it exists now, under the Republican plan you'll get a voucher that will pay as little as half your Medicare costs when you turn 65 - and as little as a quarter in your 80s. And all so that millionaires and billionaires can have a huge tax cut. ~ David Frum

We have a presidential nominee in Hillary Clinton who knows that, in a time of stunningly wide disparities of wealth in our nation, America's greatness must not be measured by how many millionaires and billionaires we have, but by how few people we have living in poverty. ~ Cory Booker

I am upset and completely disappointed in the government, the millionaires and billionaires in the U.S. See what's happening to the country? Look at all the health problems, the economy, the recession and crime. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don't manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring. Not coincidentally, this is the same reason that only one-third of Americans are happy at their jobs. When there's no forward momentum in our careers, we get depressed, too. ~ Shane Snow

Trust me... It's not called Wicked Pleasure for nothing. You won't be able to put it down once you start!!! ~ Scarlett Avery

While the senate goes on spring break during a deadly pandemic, they're telling us peasants to go back to work, because the billionaires need more billions. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Change creates millionaires. Those who observe and take advantage of change will be the new millionaires and billionaires. ~ M.J. DeMarco

We tossed the bag into the pool. I resisted the urge to jump in after it.
"There you go, Andvari," I said. "Enjoy."
Or maybe Andvari was gone. In which case we'd just made a family of trout billionaires. ~ Rick Riordan

Yeah," Stoney muttered, "easy. Except for all the guns and the running around and the chance that somebody might try to follow you. Or that somebody might recognize you. You've been on TV, if you'll recall."
"Ah, but I thought of that," she returned, reaching into a sack beside her and pulling out a blonde wig.
"I hope that thing's bulletproof," her former fence said dourly.
She smiled at Rick. "Is it true, Mr. Addison?" she chirped, pulling on the headpiece. "Do billionaires prefer blondes?"
He snorted, reaching across the table to twist a strand of the golden blonde hair in his fingers. "You look good in any color, Yank. If being blonde will get you out of the Met safely, then yes, today I prefer blondes."
She stood, leaning over to kiss him on his sensuous mouth. "Good answer. ~ Suzanne Enoch

You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more. ~ Timothy Noah

Billionaires rather not have friends than being surrounded by idiots. ~ Robin Sacredfire

The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who've maximized 1 or 2 strengths. ~ Timothy Ferriss

Many hedge fund managers have become billionaires; perhaps this - plus their reputations as the smartest guys in the room - is why they have captured the investing public's imagination. ~ Barry Ritholtz

We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics... ~ Thomas Piketty

If we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we choose to keep a tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we've got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship. ~ Barack Obama

What my campaign is about is a political revolution - millions of people standing up and saying, enough is enough. Our government belongs to all of us, and not just the hand full of billionaires. ~ Bernie Sanders

Be yourself. That's it. I got about 45 [billionaires] . They are all different, all unique, and they are all self-made. ~ Tony Robbins

As of early 2016, the sixty-two richest people in the world were worth as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people! Since the world's population is about 7.2 billion, it means that these sixty-two billionaires together hold as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humankind.37 The ~ Yuval Noah Harari

For daughters of the new American billionaires of the 19th century, it was the ultimate deal: marriage to a cash-strapped British Aristocrat in return for a title and social status. But money didn't always buy them happiness. ~ Daisy Goodwin

What kind of nation are we when we give tax breaks to billionaires, but we can't take care of the elderly and the children. ~ Bernie Sanders

Billionaires' working hours are twenty-four seven. They don't wait till Monday. ~ Sophie Page

We see men and women who work as hard as they possibly can and still fall behind a little more every month. We see lives that look nothing like those lived by billionaires in eighteen-thousand-square-foot condos, because these people don't live in some fairy tale - they live in today's reality. * ~ Elizabeth Warren

Billionaires like the Koch brothers, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, and political puppet master Karl Rove should not be able to buy our elections. Secret money should not be able to drown out the voices of the American people and sell our Democracy to the highest bidder. ~ Hank Johnson

A government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom, morality, and humanity. ~ Michael Moore

All those predictions about how much economic growth will be created by this, all of those new jobs, would be created by the things we wanted - the extension of unemployment insurance and middle class tax cuts. An estate tax for millionaires adds exactly zero jobs. A tax cut for billionaires - virtually none. ~ Anthony Weiner

We're not going to give tax breaks to billionaires and then cut back on the needs of our elderly or poor or kids or education. We're not going to privatize Social Security - in fact, we're going to strengthen it. We're going to provide quality education for every kid in America, from preschool through college. We have to take on these corporate leaders who are selling out the American people, whose allegiance is now much more to China than it is to the United States. If we have the courage to take these people on, I think we can overwhelm George W. Bush and his friends. ~ Bernie Sanders

Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America. ~ Bernie Sanders

BEHIND THE BILLIONS 172 words After our annual ranking of the world's wealthiest was published, wealth reporter Chase Peterson-Withorn, who helped research and compile FORBES' 2015 Billionaires list, hopped on Reddit for an "Ask Me Anything" chat. MATADERO Has anyone on the Billionaires list attended community college or ~ Anonymous

I'm a wealth creator. I'm not interested in saving in the least. While I do spend a lot, I don't spend money like other billionaires. I'm probably quite unusual, albeit I do have some of the significant trappings. But I always try to make my assets work for a living. ~ John Caudwell

Grim grey-cloud morning . . . brightened up, for me at least, by the first review of my new novel, 'Billionaires' Banquet'. A tad early, but the Scottish Review of Books clearly just couldn't wait to share the glad tidings! Phew! Quote: 'Brilliant! . . . a suavely compelling, ceaselessly inventive entertainment . . . delivered with delirious aplomb . . . Butlin is both a master farceur and a merciless satirist.' Will be giving it a nervous first airing tomorrow at the Aye Write festival (treading the boards with the great Carl MacDougall). Fingers crossed, please! ~ Ron Butlin

Millionaires don't use astrology ... the billionaires do. ~ J. P. Morgan

During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires. ~ Thomas Frank

I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I've dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

They talk about class warfare
the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people? ~ Bernie Sanders

He's an enigma wrapped up in sensuality padlocked with a dozen chains of desire and topped off with a razor-sharp ribbon of danger. There are more layers to him than a billionaire's wedding cake. ~ Darynda Jones

Why have one alpha billionaire when you can have two? ~ Scarlett Avery

It appears the Kochs are among the most defensive billionaires, preferring the comfy confines of their callous and intellectually dishonest world view. ~ Robert Greenwald

Millionaires don't use Astrology, billionaires do. ~ J. P. Morgan

Are we comfortable as a nation to see a huge increase in millionaires and billionaires but have more people living in austerity than ever? ~ Fuad Alakbarov

Some people believe that "fashion" is everything. Every six months, they spend a fortune changing some tiny detail in order to keep up their membership in the very exclusive tribe of the rich. If they were to visit Silicon Valley, where the billionaires of the IT industry wear plastic watches and beat-up jeans, they would understand that the world has changed ~ Paulo Coelho

Today, you've got hedge fund billionaires aligned with Karl Rove, running ads against me to try to get Democrats to vote for you [Bernie Sanders]. I know this game. I'm going to stop this game. ~ Hillary Clinton

Everyone is groping and grasping," he says. "People are turning to Buddhism, Christianity, self-help, and Taoism. CEOs and billionaires run around with their spiritual masters and visit meditation rooms. ~ Anonymous

We would be billionaires, but we took responsibility for Summa's failure. ~ Edwin Soeryadjaya

Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups. ~ Ben Horowitz

What has become clear to many Americans is that the electoral system is bankrupt. As the political process becomes more privatized, outsourced, and overrun with money from corporations and billionaires, a wounded republic is on its death bed, gasping for life. ~ Henry Giroux

Introverts listen better, they assess risks more carefully, they can be wiser managers. It's not for nothing that the Silicon Valley billionaires are so often the retiring types. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

Prosperity can't be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers. Democracy can't be just for billionaires and corporations. Prosperity and democracy are part of your basic bargain, too. ~ Hillary Clinton

If you raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, you'll do nothing to address the debt and the deficit. And the thing you might do is you might finally put this economy over another cliff. These millionaires and billionaires are the folks that try to create jobs and help grow the economy. ~ Joe Walsh

poorly performing investments, and stagnating or falling wages. At the same time there are, we are told, more billionaires than ever. The rich ~ Harvey Walsh

What does a political revolution look like? It means that 80 percent of the people vote in national elections, not 40 percent. It means that billionaires can't make unlimited campaign contributions and buy and sell politicians. It means that the U.S. government represents the needs of all the people, not just the 1 percent and their lobbyists. ~ Bernie Sanders

Look at all the billionaires. If I know 15 billionaires, I know 13 unhappy people. ~ Russell Simmons

Millionaires don't have astrologers, billionaires do. ~ J. P. Morgan

Arnold Schwarzenegger cut teacher's salaries and parks and libraries rather than raise taxes for the many California millionaires and billionaires. ~ Adam McKay

If you're raised with a poverty mentality, nothing is going to change it. I do know some really stingy billionaires. I come from such a generation of hand-to-mouthers. ~ Robert Downey, Jr.

It doesn't matter who you vote for. It's still the same billionaires that run the world. ~ Geezer Butler

At least in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers - not even corrupt ones. It's directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise. It's directed at the husband of your wife's sister, because he earns 20 percent more than you do. ~ Tyler Cowen

Technologically we now have four [seven!] billion billionaires on board Spaceship Earth who are entirely unaware of their good fortune. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

At least once a year, I meet with a group called the Giving Pledge. It's a group of billionaires - including me, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Ted Turner - who have pledged to give away most of their money to charity. We meet for three days to talk about what we're doing to help make the planet a better place to live. ~ John Paul DeJoria