Every financier ought to be a polymath, because finance is the thread that runs through every aspect of life. It is indeed the knot where all the disparate strands of human existence come together. Business is the common denominator of all activities and enterprises. This, in turn, means there is no affair that does not pertain to the businessman.

More drastic measures were required. I have always been a guardian of public interest, even when it may seem that my actions go against the public interest. My record of long investments in enterprises that led to America’s growth speaks for itself. In 1929, however, disgusted by the depraved greed disrupting the affairs of the Exchange on the one

Wherever her family went, she became the node that connected all wandering Americans worth knowing.

Because she saw that he was, in essence, alone. In his vast solitude she would find hers—and with it, the freedom her overbearing parents had always denied her.

The picture of a cigar-smoking cabal pulling the strings of Wall Street from a drawing room is ludicrous.

Whatever the past may have handed on to us, it is up to each one of us to chisel our present out of the shapeless block of the future.

While grateful for it, he was suspicious of the American notion of freedom, which he viewed as a strict synonym of conformism or, even worse, the mere possibility of choosing between different versions of the same product.

know the days ahead of me are fewer than those I have left behind. There is no escaping this most basic fact of accounting. A certain amount of time is allotted to each of us. How much, only God knows. We cannot invest it. We cannot hope for a return of any kind. All we can do is spend it, second by second, decade by decade, until it runs out.

I signed without reading the papers. I had no choice—and, at the time, no intention of divulging any of his secrets.