Quotes about investment
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Garrison Keillor photo
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Nigel Lawson photo
Nouriel Roubini photo
Ann Coulter photo
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh photo

“It seems to me that it's the best way of wasting money that I know of. I don't think investments on the moon pay a very high dividend.”

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921) member of the British Royal Family, consort to Queen Elizabeth II

On the U.S. Apollo program, press conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil (November 1968) as quoted in The Reality of Monarchy (1970) by Andrew Duncan
1960s

Andy Kessler photo

“You invest in companies with great long-term prospects.”

Andy Kessler (1958) American writer

Part I, Raising Funds, H & Screw Conference, p. 21.
Running Money (2004) First Edition

Alfred de Zayas photo

“All international investment agreements under negotiation should include a clear provision stipulating that in case of conflict between the human rights obligations of a State and those under other treaties, human rights conventions prevail”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the adverse impacts of free trade and investment agreements on a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx.
2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

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Alfred P. Sloan photo

“You of course appreciate that this industry of ours the automotive industry is today the greatest in the world. Three or four years ago it passed, in volume, steel and steel products, the next largest industry. This means, expressed otherwise, that upon its prosperity depends the prosperity of many millions of our citizens and the degree to which it has become stabilized in turn has a tremendous influence on the stabilization of industry as a whole, and therefore on the prosperity and happiness of still many more of our citizens. Directly and indirectly, this industry distributes hundreds of millions of dollars annually to those who are connected with it, in one way or another, as workers. It also distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in the aggregate to those who have invested in its securities. The purchasing power of this total aggregation, as you must appreciate, is tremendous.
I believe that if you questioned many of your readers as to the present position of the automotive industry, they would tell you that it is growing by leaps and bounds. I believe further you would sense uncertainty as to what is going to happen in the industry when the so-called state of saturation is reached. I do not know whether you appreciate it or not, but the industry has not grown very much during the past three or four years. It is practically stabilized at the present time.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 331-2: Speech by President Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., delivered to representatives of the automotive press at the Proving Ground on September 28, 1927.

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Jello Biafra photo

“Let's consider first Hayek's claim that prices in free market capitalism do not give people what they morally deserve. Hayek's deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational. Free market prices send signals to producers as to where their products are most in demand (and to consumers as to the opportunity costs of their options). They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information, and then only in aggregate form. This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure: there is no way to collect individualized supply and demand information in a single mind or planning agency, to use as a basis for setting prices. Free markets alone can effectively respond to this information.
It's a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking. They aim to reward people for virtuous conduct that they undertook in the past. Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now, not where the demand was when individual producers decided on their production plans. Capitalism is an inherently dynamic economic system. It responds rapidly to changes in tastes, to new sources of supply, to new substitutes for old products. This is one of capitalism's great virtues. But this responsiveness leads to volatile prices. Consequently, capitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents. However virtuous they were, by whatever standard of virtue one can name, individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn't to reward people for past good behavior. It's to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past.
This isn't to say that virtue makes no difference to what returns one may expect for one's productive contributions. The exercise of prudence and foresight in laying out one's production and investment plans, and diligence in carrying them out, generally improves one's odds. But sheer dumb luck is also, ineradicably, a prominent factor determining free market returns. And nobody deserves what comes to them by sheer luck.”

Elizabeth S. Anderson (1959) professor of philosophy and womens' studies

How Not to Complain About Taxes (III): "I deserve my pretax income" http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/how_not_to_comp_1.html (January 26, 2005)

“Ninety-nine percent of what you read about investing in magazines and newspapers, and 100% of what you hear on television is worse than useless.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Source: The Four Pillars of Investing (2002), Chapter 15, A Final Word, p. 297.

Gordon Brown photo

“Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure.”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

Michael White, "The gift of tired tongues", The Guardian, 30 September 1994; Norman Macrae, "You've never had it so incoherent", Sunday Times, 2 October 1994.
Speech at an economic seminar, Tuesday 27 September 1994.
Member of Parliament

Benjamin Graham photo
Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis photo

“Plato makes the cosmos a living being by investing the world-body with a world-soul.”

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965) Dutch historian

Source: The mechanization of the world picture, 1961, p. 15

Ranil Wickremesinghe photo

“A priority for us is the creation of more jobs that will minimise poverty and provide for prosperity for all Sri Lankans. Towards this, we need to enhance our capacity to successfully compete in global markets while creating the necessary space for investments to come in.”

Ranil Wickremesinghe (1949) Former Prime Minister of Sri Lanka

On reducing poverty in SL (Sri Lanka), quoted on World Finance (February 16, 2016), "Sri Lanka has reduced poverty but challenges remain" http://www.worldfinance.com/home/sri-lanka-has-reduced-poverty-but-challenges-remain

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Mitt Romney photo

“So we started a new business called Bain Capital. The only problem was, while WE believed in ourselves, nobody else did. We were young and had never done this before and we almost didn't get off the ground. In those days, sometimes I wondered if I had made a really big mistake. I had thought about asking my church's pension fund to invest, but I didn't. I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors' money, but I didn't want to go to hell too. Shows what I know. Another of my partners got the Episcopal Church pension fund to invest. Today there are a lot of happy retired priests who should thank him. That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story. Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples – where I'm pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised. At a time when nobody thought we'd ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and built one in a corn field in Indiana. Today Steel Dynamics is one of the largest steel producers in the United States.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2012-08-31
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160357612/transcript-mitt-romneys-acceptance-speech
Transcript: Mitt Romney's Acceptance Speech
NPR
[2012-08-30, gopconvention2012, Mitt Romney: Introduction (video), YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_cGyPwt5UI]
2012

Condoleezza Rice photo
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Jim Rogers photo

“If you bail out every investment bank that gets in trouble, that’s not capitalism, that’s socialism for the rich.”

Jim Rogers (1942) American writer

CNBC Squawk Box Europe http://www.cnbc.com/id/23588079/site/14081545

Bret Easton Ellis photo
Frank Chodorov photo
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman photo
Bertie Ahern photo

“That decision will in history be written as the biggest mistake that American administration ever made, because Lehmans was a world investment bank. They had testicles everywhere.”

Bertie Ahern (1951) Irish politician, 10th Taoiseach of Ireland

Speaking on the collapse of Lehman Brothers Bank. Lehmans world presence http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/1010/1224256328159.html (Subscription required). The Year in Quotes http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6968426.ece (Subscription required)

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Benito Juárez photo
Boris Tadić photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Paul Krugman photo

“We’re now in the seventh year of a slump brought on by Wall Street excess; the wizardly job of “allocating the economy’s investment resources” consisted, we now know, largely of funneling money into a real estate bubble.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"Iron Men of Wall Street" http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/iron-men-of-wall-street/, 16 February 2014
The Conscience of a Liberal blog

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman photo
Adolf A. Berle photo
David Allen photo

“When you "have to get organized," you're probably not appropriately invested yet in what you need to get organized for.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life (2003)

Todd Akin photo

“Now, Social Security through the years, for many many people, has been a terrible investment. It's really a tax, that's all it is. Social Security is a tax.”

Todd Akin (1947) American politician

Washington Minute, CSPAN, , quoted in * 2011-03-19
GOP Rep. Todd Akin On Social Security: ‘I Don’t Like It’
Alex
Seitz-Wald
Think Progress
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/19/151641/todd-akin-i-dont-like-social-security/

Warren Buffett photo
Frances Kellor photo

“A first proposition, therefore, in Americanization is to find a way to satisfy the creative instinct in men and their sense of home, by giving them and their native-born sons the widest possible knowledge of America, including a pictorial geography, a simple history of the United States, the stories of successful Americans including those of foreign-born origin; a knowledge of American literature, of our political ideals and institutions, and of oiy: free educational opportunities. A systematic effort should be made to give them a land interest and a home stake and to get them close to the soil, not alone in the day's work but also in their cultural life. The men most likely to desert America at the close of the war will be workers with job stakes and wage rates, and not those with a home stake and investments. I would carry this campaign of information into every foreign language publication, every newspaper, every shop, and every racial center in America. The land interpreter of the future will be the government, and Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, has foreseen this in his appeal for the use of the land for the rehabilitation of men returning from the front. It is the land that will make the life of the maimed livable and will connect the past with the future. This will not be achieved by forced "back-to-the-land movements" and colonization. Each individual American who interprets the beauty of America and its meaning, and who, wherever he can, personally puts the foreign-born in touch with the soil and helps him to a plot of ground which he can call his own, is doing effective Americanization. Loyalty and efficiency are inherent in this land sense, and they are the strength of a nation.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Deendayal Upadhyaya photo
Joan Robinson photo

“Rosa Luxemburg maintained that the capitalist system can keep up its rate of investment (and therefore its profits) only so long as it is expanding geographically.”

Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist

Source: Economic Heresies (1971), Chapter III, Interest and Profits, p. 50 (confer Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Buch II, Chapter XX, p. 474)

John F. Kennedy photo
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Alfred P. Sloan photo

“It was not, however, a matter of interest to me only with respect to my divisions, since as a member of the Executive Committee, I was a kind of general executive and so had begun to think from the corporate viewpoint. The important thing was that no one knew how much was being contributed — plus or minus — by each division to the common good of the corporation. And since, therefore, no one knew, or could prove, where the efficiencies and inefficiencies lay, there was no objective basis for the allocation of new investment. This was one of the difficulties with the expansion program of that time. It was natural for the divisions to compete for investment funds, but it was irrational for the general officers of the corporation not to know where to place the money to best advantage. In the absence of objectivity it was not surprising that there was a lack of real agreement among the general officers. Furthermore, some of them had no broad outlook, and used their membership on the Executive Committee mainly to advance the interests of their respective divisions.
The important thing was that no one knew how much was being contributed—plus or minus—by each division to the common good of the corporation. And since, therefore, no one knew, or could prove, where the efficiencies and inefficiencies lay, there was no objective basis for the allocation of new investment.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 48-49

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Georges Bataille photo

“Inner experience, unable to have principles either in dogma (a moral attitude), or in science (knowledge can be neither its goal nor its origin), or in a search of enriching states (an experimental, aesthetic attitude), it cannot have any other concern nor other goal than itself. Opening myself to inner experience, I have placed in it all value and authority. Henceforth I can have no other value, no other authority (in the realm of mind). Value and authority imply the discipline of a method, the existence of a community.
I call experience a voyage to the end of the possible of man. Anyone may choose not to embark on this voyage, but if he does embark on it, this supposes the negation of the authorities, the existing values which limit the possible. By virtue of the fact that it is negation of other values, other authorities, experience, having a positive existence, becomes itself positively value and authority.
Inner experience has always had objectives other than itself in which one invested value and authority. … If God, knowledge, and suppression of pain were to cease to be in my eyes convincing objectives, … would inner experience from that moment seem empty to me, henceforth impossible without justification? …
I received the answer [from Blanchot]: experience itself is authority.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 7

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Éric Pichet photo
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Peter D. Schiff photo

“Non-dividend-paying growth stocks can be attractive but should be viewed as speculation rather than investing.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Quotes from Crash Proof (2006)

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Alex Salmond photo
Joyce Carol Oates photo

“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

"The Calendar's New Clothes," New York Times (30 December 1999)

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Mahendra Chaudhry photo
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Alfred de Zayas photo

“Countries that benefit from World Bank financing should ensure that all loans they request and all foreign direct investment they receive are used in a manner that advances the enjoyment of human rights and does not result in the enrichment of a few at the expense of the many.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the adverse impact of World Bank policies on human rights and the realisation of a democratic and equitable international order
2017, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

J.M. Coetzee photo
Algernon Sidney photo

“The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question; that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, The theory of the firm in the last ten Years, 1942, p. 793 cited in: Pedro Garcia Duarte (2010) " A Path through the Wilderness: Time Discounting in Growth Models http://public.econ.duke.edu/~staff/wrkshop_papers/2009-2010_Papers/PGDuarte_Path_Through_Wilderness.pdf"

Hillary Clinton photo

“A big part of our plan will be unleashing the power of the private sector to create more jobs at higher pay. And that means for us, creating an infrastructure bank to get private funds off the sidelines and complement our private investments.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Warren, Michigan (August 11, 2016)

Stephen R. Covey photo

“Self growth is tender; it's holy ground. There's no higher investment.”

Source: The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People (1989), p. 62

Albert Jay Nock photo
Ron Kaufman photo

“Service does not exist at the expense of your profits. Profit exists because you made the investment in service.”

Ron Kaufman (1956) American author and consultant

Lift Me UP! Service With A Smile (2005)

Nick Hanauer photo
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Lev Leviev photo

“There’s a big difference between education and knowledge. The moment that we don’t invest in educating Jewish children according to the roots that were the basis of our education for thousands of years, we are knowledge-givers rather than educators.”

Lev Leviev (1956) Soviet-born Israeli businessman, philanthropist and investor

Interview, Jewish Chronicle, 7 March 2008 http://thejc.com/home.aspx?AId58607&ATypeId1&searchtrue2&srchstrLev%20leviev&srchtxt1&srchhead1&srchauthor1&srchsandp1&scsrch0

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