Top 40 Lloyd Blankfein Quotes

I always had a lot of confidence in my ability to gauge a situation and people and try to understand them and what they were saying and what their context was.

Ambition is your inner voice that tells you you can and should strive to go beyond your circumstances or station in life.

All you can do is the best you can do.

Change is often the agent of progress in ways we can’t always readily see in the early days.

The U.S. is not pure capitalism. In fact, there’s no place for pure capitalism, unregulated capitalism. We have a regulated system.

Every time I get accustomed to low volatility, like we were towards the end of the Greenspan era, and we think we have all the levers under the control… something erupts to remind us that the idea that anybody is in control of everything is hubris.

As CEO of a big company, I have to be a kind of a champion of the interests of our people as insofar as their ability to do their job, to feel comfortable in their work environment, and to be able to fulfill their ambitions.

In 2007, in the early 2007, everybody saw the housing market was falling, and at any given moment a lot of people thought it was going to fall more, and a lot of people thought it was going to rebound. You just didn’t know.

When yields on corporate bonds are lower than dividends on stocks, that unnerves me.

No one at Goldman Sachs gets paid out of his or her own P&L. It matters how your business is doing, but it matters more how the firm as a whole is doing.

It’s very hard to go out and make big investments to take advantage of the shale energy if we don’t know if it’s always going to be there, what price it’s going to be there, whether the country’s going to allow it to be exported, or whether it’s going to go and affect subsidized U.S. manufacturing.

Businesses will ultimately go where the markets and opportunities are.

The list of things that are conventional today that I use every day that I thought would never make it is a very long list.

I always thought that a prep school was what some people went to after high school to prepare themselves for college.

Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.

You have to, in your own life, get people to want to work with you and want to help you. The organizational chart, in my opinion, means very little. I need my bosses’ goodwill, but I need the goodwill of my subordinates even more.

I never thought I would tweet – I thought it was too dangerous.

You can see that all these people who did really great things failed six times or didn’t get going until they were much older. I think that’s much more instructive and educational.

I read a lot of history, and I know that once upon a time, a coin was worth $5 if it had $5 worth of gold in it. Now we have paper that is just backed by fiat… Maybe in the new world, something gets backed by consensus.

I’ve learned over the years that there’s a lot of things that work out pretty well that I don’t love.

The best traders are not right more than they are wrong. They are quick adjusters. They are better at getting right when they are wrong.

With interest rates rising, gold doesn’t pay an interest rate, but every other currency – it becomes not only less important to hold gold as an alternative, but more expensive to hold it as an insurance policy and so that will be a burden on the price of gold.

My favourite day is like when it’s raining, and I can just lie on the couch.

Let me tell you, there’s very few places where I don’t have an agenda.

You don’t know how you’ll react to things until you live through them.

If you do something really well, the entire world beats a path to your door. The number three, number five, number 400 player gets nothing. It’s almost a winner take all.

I got into Goldman really by acquisition because I had gone – I grew up in east New York in the Linden Projects – I did go to fancy schools, but my resume wasn’t up to a Wall Street set of resumes. I went to college. I went to law school and practiced for a while.

My – I grew up in – I grew up in public housing. My dad, for most of my life, worked for the post office, which was a terrific job to get because you couldn’t lose your job.

I am one with the popular culture.

To the extent I bloomed, I’m a late bloomer.

Growth requires risk-taking. If you want to dampen risk and make sure you never have a problem, you do so, but that also will have an effect on growth. This is a decision that doesn’t necessarily belong to financial institutions. It belongs to regulators and legislators who represent the body politic.

There’s not a sport or activity in life where you have a really hard grip, you actually do better. Whether it’s baseball or golf or kicking a ball, the looser you are, the further the thing goes… If you’re tight, you’re not necessarily better.

I would have liked to be a nerd. I didn’t even make it to that.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn’t done in one stroke, and it wasn’t done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of ’33, ’34, ’35, ’37, ’39, and ’41.

There is a tradition in America of people in business not only commenting on the way the government is being run but doing something about it if they don’t like it. In fact, they don’t just rail about it: they go into government, like some of my ex-colleagues.

We’ve had this program for a number of years now, called 10,000 Small Businesses, where Goldman Sachs has convened a group of partners to basically give business education to small business owners.

I don’t look forward to a time when every politician, every legislator goes to Washington absolutely committed to an extreme point of view. Elected representatives are sent to Washington to compromise, not to never compromise.

Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people.

I’d say if you wanted to forestall bad events, the best thing to do is anticipate them and try to correct them before they get close.

The ability for employment benefits to be shared among spouses, the ability to move people who are dependent on visas for trailing spouses, all hinges on being able to deal with families of gay people in the same way that you deal with families of straight people. Otherwise, they can’t move around.