“You don’t run a business hoping you don’t have a recession,”

“He has an amazing sense of risk,” says his former colleague at Smith Barney, Bob Lessin, currently vice chairman of investment bank Jeffries & Company. “He understands it intuitively better than anyone alive, so he doesn’t do stupid things. The industry has a recent history of dramatically mis-pricing risk relative to return. Jamie never fell

Moments after sitting down, Lee pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and put it down on the table next to him. Dimon looked at Lee and said, “What’s that?” Lee replied, “It’s the list of things I needed to do today. I wanted to make sure I covered all the topics I wanted to talk to you about.” Dimon looked incredulous. “Let me see that,” he sa

“honesty,” “integrity and honor,” and doing “the right thing, not necessarily the easy or expedient thing.”

“We think [the business] should be prepared for adverse times,” Dimon told analysts in a conference call. “In fact, we think if you’re strong in adverse times that that puts you in the position where you actually can do more interesting things, either hire people or buy other companies that are having a tough time.” Dimon and his team were constant

(Dimon is fond of Mark Twain’s wry comment that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.)

Ever a student of history, Dimon sent Paulson a note including a citation from a speech Theodore Roosevelt made in Paris in 1910: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred

“They feel a tremendous pressure to grow. Well, sometimes you can’t grow. Sometimes you don’t want to grow. In certain businesses, growth means you either take on bad clients, excess risk, or too much leverage. Wall Street firms felt this pressure to grow, and they succumbed to it.”

When talking of the most important things in his life, he once said, “My family, humanity, my country, and the world. And way down here is J.P. Morgan.”