Venture Capital Quotes

When you - when you - and this is still going on today - are making your money by pushing paper around, when you should be making your money by investing venture capital in various job-creating things, that makes it much harder to recover. ~ Howard Dean

It is clear as you look at the team why Data Point Capital has so quickly become one of the premier venture capital firms. I look forward to adding to the firm's very bright future. ~ Colin Angle

venture capital funding in robotics is growing at a steep rate. It more than doubled in just three years, from $160 million in 2011 to $341 million in 2014. ~ Alec J. Ross

First-time fund is acceptable, but not a first-time investor. ~ Mahendra Ramsinghani

I was encouraged to break all the rules but to take the best of philanthropy, the best of investing, and the best of development finance, and experiment with new ways to create this venture capital model of using philanthropy to back patient capital investments, and then build solutions that were measured in terms of the kind of impact and change they were making on people's lives and in the world, not just on the financial return. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

Each year about 600,000 start-ups are launched. Less than 0.5 percent attract VC. Of Inc. magazine's annual list of the 500 fastest growing companies in the United States assessed over a decade (1997–2007), less than 20 percent of companies were venture backed"
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"62.4 percent of VC investments were completely lost while 3.1 percent of the investments accounted for 53 percent of the profits for roughly 600 investments ~ Mahendra Ramsinghani

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States. ~ Ron Chernow

Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits. ~ Alex Berenson

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world. ~ Alain De Botton

Venture capital today is clustered in just a few locations - Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and D.C. It's far from efficiently distributed and accessible. ~ Jose Ferreira

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside - as the startup culture sees it - while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures. ~ Ellen Ullman

The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined. ~ Peter Thiel

The problem with taking venture capital is if you take $5m from someone, it may feel great; you may feel like they're validating your business model. But they're giving $5m out to 20 different people, hoping one of them will be a hit. They don't really care if it's you. ~ Jon Oringer

Finance is critical. If sufficient investment is made in infrastructure and venture capital is made available, there will be a big improvement in the situation. ~ Sanjay Kumar

The evidence summarized in this matrix may be of some use to venture capital investors, as a general way to frame the riskiness of proposed investments. It suggests that start-ups which propose to commercialize a breakthrough technology that is essentially sustaining in character have a far lower likelihood of success than start-ups whose vision is to use proven technology to disrupt an established industry with something that is simpler, more reliable, and more convenient. ~ Clayton M Christensen

I think 'Something Ventured' is a nice piece because it celebrates venture capital in a unique and powerful way. ~ Nolan Bushnell

Where micro-finance focuses on small loans to individual, low-income women, think of Acumen Fund more like a venture capital fund. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

Many of the best firms historically in venture capital have been multi-sector. ~ Marc Andreesen

We believed the world didn't need another commoditized venture capital firm. ~ Dan Levitan

Never go into venture capital if you want a peaceful life. ~ Georges F. Doriot

There are lots of ways to make money in venture capital, and there are even more ways to be mediocre. The industry has too much money and too many smart people chasing too few great entrepreneurs. ~ Dan Levitan

The innovation industries are rapidly going global. In five years, more than 50% of venture capital returns will come from markets outside the United States, including China, India, Brazil, and Australia, and AlwaysOn events are on top of these trends. ~ Jim Breyer

Bitcoin itself has already cycled through the familiar trajectory of rebellious alternative, promising a currency independent of the state, through to a venture-capital-funded investment vehicle in which 0.1% of the participants own 50% of the coins. The debate ~ Tom Slee

I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me. ~ Mitch Kapor

So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illiquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster. ~ Fred Wilson

A $100,000,000 venture capital fund was set up solely for products using a specific computer language. ~ Cay S. Horstmann

I believe Twitter, right now, is just finishing the venture capital phase, getting into a maturity level. ~ Al-Waleed Bin Talal

Hedge funds, private equity and venture capital funds have played an important role in providing liquidity to our financial system and improving the efficiency of capital markets. But as their role has grown, so have the risks they pose. ~ Jack Reed

Working in the context of ultra-famous brands like Dior and Vuitton, creative spirits are always going to feel reined in. It's important that they are free to develop ideas. And rather than detracting from the principal job, it reinforces it. I think of that money as venture capital. It's not a big investment. ~ Bernard Arnault

A good portfolio manager knows which companies to keep and which ones to let go. Many a GP has struggled with portfolio companies that cannot meet their value-creation milestones, or raise additional follow-on rounds of capital, or generate target returns in a time span of, say, five to seven years. The faster you recognize those losses, the better it is."
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"As David Cowan says, "Just focus on your top five - the rest is distraction." The harder part of the investor's discipline is to know when to quit."
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"You have to constantly scan all of those things and be willing to adjust your own sense of what's a reasonable outcome and move the company into a position where it has the maximum chance to succeed. "
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"Time is your enemy: Portfolio companies always take twice as much capital and twice as long to exit. Early-stage companies rarely meet milestones as planned and always burn cash faster than anticipated. ~ Mahendra Ramsinghani

Whatever the potential pitfalls, banks are increasingly enthusiastic about venture capital, particularly in new companies with strong prospects in fields like health care and technology. ~ Alex Berenson

In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and their backers got drunk on the overflowing optimism and abundant venture capital and threw a two-year-long party. Capital was cheap, opportunities seemed limitless, and pineapple-infused-vodka martinis were everywhere. ~ Brad Stone

Most venture capital funds are too short-termist and exit-driven to deal with the highly uncertain and lengthy innovation process. ~ Mariana Mazzucato

Rejecting the rules of late-stage tech-bubble venture-capital madness is a better, more resilient, and durable approach to business in a digital landscape. Who better to affirm this than one of the digital industry's most trusted news and analysis sources, PandoDaily. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

For a first-time entrepreneur, there's nothing better than being in Silicon Valley because there is so much going on, and there's such a large number of inventors, that even a B level idea or a C level idea could be nurtured and be given venture capital there. ~ Jason Calacanis

The best early-stage venture capital investments appear obvious in retrospect; however, very few of them are actually obvious when you make them. ~ David Sze

Northleaf is delighted to have been chosen to manage the new fund. We look forward to implementing the fund's long-term strategy of constructing a portfolio of high-potential venture capital funds with the scale and resources to execute their plans, support successful high-growth companies and deliver world-class returns. ~ Jeff Pentland

We need to start to talk about money in ways that dethrone it and make it subject to human ethics and standards of love and decency. ~ Joel Solomon

State funds, private equity, venture capital, and institutional lending all have their role in the lifecycle of a high tech startup, but angel capital is crucial for first-time entrepreneurs. Angel investors provide more than just cash; they bring years of expertise as both founders of businesses and as seasoned investors. ~ Jay Samit

Harvard and Yale concentrated with venture capitalists that got the best calls and brainpower. Very few firms made most of the money, and they made it in just a few periods. Everyone else returned between mediocre and lousy. When returns happened, envy rippled through institutional money management. The amount invested in venture capital went up 10 times post-1999. That later money was lost very quickly. It will happen again. I don't know anyone who successfully resists this stuff. It becomes a new orthodoxy. ~ Charlie Munger

The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem.
This strategy, of breaking a project down into discrete, relatively small problems to be resolved, is what Bing Gordon, a cofounder and the former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts, calls smallifying. Now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gordon has deep experience leading and working with software development teams. He's also currently on the board of directors of Amazon and Zynga. At Electronic Arts, Gordon found that when software teams worked on longer-term projects, they were inefficient and took unnecessary paths. However, when job tasks were broken down into particular problems to be solved, which were manageable and could be tackled within one or two weeks, developers were more creative and effective. ~ Peter Sims

There's never been a good period of venture capital when prices weren't high. ~ Peter Barris

Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has. ~ Bill Gurley

As a lot of the venture capital world seems to be shifting away from consumer, we want to make sure that consumer entrepreneurs know there's still money available. ~ Dan Levitan

You know what works in venture capital? A group of incredibly smart, connected people who have the financial wherewithal and risk appetite to make multi-million dollar bets on unproven ideas and inexperienced founders. People who can make decisions quickly, and who spend their time trying to help entrepreneurs make the most of that cash. ~ Sarah Lacy

Some big banks remain wary of venture capital. ~ Alex Berenson

I'm amazed by the potential of more companies employing integrated philanthropic initiatives at earlier stages in their life cycle. What if this were done on an even more massive scale? Consider what would happen if a top-tier venture-capital firm required the companies in which it invested to place 1% of their equity into a foundation serving the communities in which they do business. ~ Marc Benioff

We own only a small percentage in Omnivore, but we manage it. It is basically a venture capital fund to help newer enterprises and provide them with the funding they require in their early stages of development. ~ Adi Godrej

If your business had no risk, you could go get a bank loan and call it a day. VCs like risks - without them, venture capital wouldn't exist. But they need to be risks that VCs are good at assessing and managing. ~ Jose Ferreira

When I started Biocon in 1978, the obstacles I needed to navigate were manifold - ranging from infrastructural hurdles to issues related to my credibility as a business woman. With no access to venture capital, money was scarce and high-cost, debt-based capital was all I had. ~ Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

After Secretary Clinton announced in January 2010 that Internet freedom would be a major pillar of U.S. foreign policy, the State Department decided to take what Clinton calls a 'venture capital' approach to the funding of tools, research, public information projects, and training. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

My buddy Alex Blumberg learned - he was very public about his learning process, and I know for a fact because we sat next to each other for many years, that he knew nothing about venture capital or seed rounds or "A" rounds or whatever you call them, and he had to really learn, like, pitch by pitch. He just screwed pitches up. ~ David Plotz

I'm gonna say it one more time. We are Georgia Southern. Our colors are blue and white. We call ourselves the Bald Eagles. We call our offense the Georgia Power Companyand that's a terrific name for an offense. Our snap count is 'rate, hike.' We practice on the banks of Beautiful Eagle Creek and that's in Statesboro, Georgia-the gnat capital of America. Our weekends begin on Thursday. The co-eds outnumber the men 3 to 2. They're all good looking and they're all rich. And folks, you just can't beat that and you just can't beat Georgia Southern. And you ain't seen nothin yet! ~ Erk Russell

The epic struggle to pass health care reform was at once a shameless betrayal of the public trust of historic proportions and proof that a nation that perceives itself as being divided into red and blue should start paying attention to a third color that rules the day in Washington - a sort of puke-colored politics that puts together deals like this one and succeeds largely through its mastery of the capital city's bureaucracy. ~ Matt Taibbi

I think this country would be much better off if we did not have capital punishment ... We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated. ~ John Paul Stevens

The big issue is whether the United States will succeed in its venture of reshaping the Middle East. It is not clear to me that using military force is the way to do it. We should not have gone into Iraq. But we have. ~ Milton Friedman

To succeed, you must take a risk and venture out of your comfort zone in order to fly. ~ Debasish Mridha

The only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is the knowledge and ability of its people. The productivity of that capital depends on how effectively people share their competence with those who can use it. ~ Andrew Carnegie

The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions. ~ Nate Silver

Learn to raise capital by any means necessary. That's your primary job as an entrepreneur. You must continually raise capital from family and friends, banks, suppliers, customers and investors. ~ Richard Branson

Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful, it's tough, it's buried in our mythic, childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure. ~ Greg Bear

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But, if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat. ~ Mark Twain

The whole profit of the issuance of money has provided the capital of the great banking business as it exists today. ~ Frederick Soddy

I think there's an awful lot of twaddle and bullshit on EVA. The whole game is to turn retained earnings into more earnings. EVA has ideas about cost of capital that make no sense. Of course, if a company generates high returns on capital and can maintain this over time, it will do well. But the mental system as a whole does not work. ~ Charlie Munger

For I choose to follow not men or men's doctrines, but God and the doctrines [delivered] by Him. For if you have fallen in with some who are called Christians, but who do not admit this [truth], and venture to blaspheme the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; who say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven; do not imagine that they are Christians ~ Justin Martyr

She lay there with her eyes closed, as if sleep were a shy creature that might venture out if she played dead. But every time it seemed to be drawing closer, some loud thought would crash and blunder through the undergrowth, putting it to flight. ~ Frances Hardinge

Raising taxes is not a frivolous venture that you do on the editorial page of 'The New Republic,' for god sakes. It's something that you really have to think about and go through carefully. ~ Arthur Laffer

The decided to go exploring, be Indiana Jones they don't have a light they don't have a map you're a screwed with a capital S. ~ Joe Teti

Bakunin's warnings about the "Red bureaucracy" that would institute "the worst of all despotic governments" were long before Lenin, and were directed against the followers of Mr. Marx. There were, in fact, followers of many different kinds; Pannekoek, Luxemburg, Mattick and others are very far from Lenin, and their views often converge with elements of anarcho-syndicaIism. Korsch and others wrote sympathetically of the anarchist revolution in Spain, in fact. There are continuities from Marx to Lenin, but there are also continuities to Marxists who were harshly critical of Lenin and Bolshevism. Teodor Shanin's work in the past years on Marx's later attitudes towards peasant revolution is also relevant here. I'm far from being a Marx scholar, and wouldn't venture any serious judgement on which of these continuities reflects the "real Marx," if there even can be an answer to that question. ~ Noam Chomsky

For millions of people, "wealth" amounts to little more than a few weeks' wages in a checking account or low-interest savings account, a car, and a few pieces of furniture. The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine that it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities. That is why it is so essential to study capital and its distribution in a methodical, systematic way. ~ Thomas Piketty

Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city. ~ Sarah Hall

Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs. ~ Vaclav Havel

WHAT? YOU AGAIN?' he shouted in capital letters. ~ Noel Langley

I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital [Paris]. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The Chinese had first learned of the Roman Empire in 139 B.C., when the emperor Wudi had sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, past the deserts to seek allies to the west. Zhang Qian traveled for twelve years to what is now Turkistan and back and reported on the astounding discovery that there was a fairly advanced civilization to the west. In 104 B.C. and 102 B.C., Chinese armies reached the area, a former Greek kingdom called Sogdiana with its capital in Samarkand, where they met and defeated a force partly composed of captive Roman soldiers. ~ Mark Kurlansky

"Patents make our product defensible." The optimal number of times to use the P word in a presentation is one. Just once, say, "We have filed patents for what we are doing." Done. The second time you say it, venture capitalists begin to suspect that you are depending too much on patents for defensibility. The third time you say it, you are holding a sign above your head that says, "I am clueless." ~ Guy Kawasaki

The murder that is depicted as a horrible crime is repeated in cold blood, remorselessly. ~ Cesare Beccaria

As President Bush has said on numerous occasions, it is the government's role to create the conditions, the friendly environment, that will attract capital. ~ Donald Evans

To be sure, the cost of managing capital and of "formal" financial intermediation (that is, the investment advice and portfolio management services provided by a bank or official financial institution or real estate agency or managing partner) is obviously taken into account and deducted from the income on capital in calculating the average rate of return (as presented here). But this is not the case with "informal" financial intermediation: every investor spends time - in some cases a lot of time - managing his own portfolio and affairs and determining which investments are likely to be the most profitable. This effort can in certain cases be compared to genuine entrepreneurial labor or to a form of business activity. ~ Thomas Piketty

The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever-growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without. ~ Loren Eiseley

Technology has no function except to save labor. Yet how often do we hear that the purpose of new capital formation is to create jobs? ~ Louis O. Kelso

If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts. ~ Charles Jencks

Surely there is not a capitalist or well-informed person in this world today who believes that [World War I] is being fought to make the world safe for democracy. It is being fought to make the world safe for capital. ~ Rose Pastor Stokes

The bourgeoisie loves so-called " positive " types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one's innocence , to be a beast and still be happy . ~ Anton Chekhov

If you're an investor who wants a little bit more from the capital-appreciation side of things, but still likes this concept of getting 'paid by the company,' then we would tell that investor to pursue shareholder yield. ~ James O'Shaughnessy

To save the planet, we do not need miraculous technical breakthroughs, or vast amounts of capital. Essentially we need a radical change in our thinking and behaviour. ~ Ted Trainer

In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.) ~ Alvin Plantinga

Women (...) have been encouraged since they were children to be dependent to an unhealthy degree. Any woman who looks within knows that she was never trained to be comfortable with the idea of taking care of herself, standing up for herself, asserting herself. At best she may have played the game of independence, inwardly envying the boys (and later the men) because they seemed so naturally self-sufficient.

It is not nature that bestows this self-sufficiency on men; it's training. Males are educated for independence from the day they are born. Just as systematically, women are taught that they have an out - that someday, in some way, they are going to be saved. That is the fairy tale, the life-message (...) We may venture out on our own for a while. We may go away to school, work, travel; we may even make good money, but underneath it all there is a finite quality to our feelings about independence. Only hang on long enough, the childhood story goes, and someday someone will come along to rescue you from the anxiety of authentic living. (The only savior the boy learns about is himself.) ~ Colette Dowling

The key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

Once again, he found himself smiling secretly at the fact that she'd reeled him in without any real effort. In fact, he would venture to say that she had no idea she'd even achieved that. Maybe that too was part of the appeal. The fact that unlike most of the women of his acquaintance she hadn't been gunning for him. ~ Jordan Silver

Supply-side economists argue that because lower tax rates allow everyone in the private sector to keep more of what they earn, tax relief provides citizens with strong incentives to work longer hours (thus increasing labor), to save and invest more of their income (thus increasing capital), and to devote more attention to innovation of all kinds (thus increasing efficiency, or TFP). ~ David A. Moss

Politicians seldom if ever get [into public office] by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged… Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic? Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can't fulfill - that no human being could fulfill? Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm or alienate any of the huge pack of morons who cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope?

Answer: maybe for a few weeks at the start… But not after the issue is fairly joined, and the struggle is on in earnest… They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants. They'll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable. They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money no one will have to earn. When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty, n.

In brief, they w ~ H.L. Mencken

Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments,
and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully
developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance
of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes
suddenly and immediately transformed from its merely ideal shape
of money of account into hard cash. Profane commodities can no
longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes
valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own
independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with
the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity,
declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are
money. But now the cry is everywhere that money alone is a
commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul
after money, the only wealth. ~ Karl Marx

There is always plenty of capital for those who can create practical plans for using it ~ Napoleon Hill

I stand proud, but I never said my pledge allegiance ~ Capital STEEZ

Art owes its origin to Nature herself ... this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it. ~ Giorgio Vasari

I'd better have a glass then. To complete my ensemble." Kestrel didn't quite forget her promise to Arin not to drink, but rather willed it away along with everything else about him.
"Oh, yes," said Jess. "You must. Don't you think so, Ronan?"
"I don't think. I am thinking of nothing other than what Kestrel could be thinking, and whether she will dance with me. If I'm not mistaken, there is one final dance before this legendary wine is served."
Kestrel's happiness faltered. "I'd love to, but…won't your parents mind?"
Ronan and Jess exchanged a glance. "They're not here," Ronan said. "They've left to spend the winter season in the capital."
Which meant that, were they here, they would object--as would any parents, given the scandal.
Ronan read Kestrel's face. "It doesn't matter what they think. Dance with me."
He took her hand, and for the first time in a long while, she felt safe. He pulled her to the center of the floor and into the motions of the dance.
Ronan didn't speak for a few moments, then touched a slim braid that curved in a tendril along Kestrel's cheek. "This is pretty."
The memory of Arin's hands in her hair made her stiffen.
"Gorgeous?" Ronan tried again. "Transcendent? Kestrel, the right adjective hasn't been invented to describe you."
She attempted a light tone. "What will ladies do, when this kind of exaggerated flirtation is no longer the fashion? We shall be spoiled."
"You know it's not mere flirtat ~ Marie Rutkoski

But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all came about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun - the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it. ~ Carson McCullers

Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance. ~ Alex Berenson

People are delighted to accept pensions and gratuities, for which they hire out their labour or their support or their services. But nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing. But if death threatens these same people, you will see them praying to their doctors; if they are in fear of capital punishment, you will see them prepared to spend their all to stay alive. ~ Seneca.