Words matter. These are the best Stephen A. Schwarzman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m pretty good on my feet. I’m pretty decent at bobbing and weaving, but there’s only so long you can bob and weave when you don’t have a good base.
I think people have to read more and learn more about what’s going on internationally.
I’m concerned with China growing at double or triple the rate of the West, that there will be tensions. One needs to do something to start addressing misunderstandings and frustration.
I like things with upside. That’s how you make money.
I grew up in a small town outside Philadelphia and went to the local high school, where I ran track all four years.
Paid leave is worth every penny.
What I’ve found in being around political people is they’re willing to negotiate their ideology somewhere around 5 percent. They believe that’s really stepping out. And it’s really hard to do business when you only move 5 percent from your ideology.
Washington, D.C., puts enormous burdens on people who, at the end of the day, are just humans.
I’m not feeling undertaxed. Tax reform is an important issue. You have to have an inherent sense of fairness.
I’ve always been comfortable with people who run things, whether it was the principal of my high school or the president of the university.
Blackstone is not really a business per se. It’s a mission to be the best.
It’s a great privilege to be asked to help the country – even if it occasionally comes with some degree of criticism.
The Schwarzman Scholars is a program that was designed with Tsinghua University. They asked me to do something in honor of their 100th anniversary.
I chose to start Schwarzman Scholars because I saw the potential for the world to become focused and unhappy with China, in large part because of the populism that was growing throughout the world.
When deals go wrong, you have no one else to blame, so you yell at yourself, and you yell at others.
I didn’t want to be a retailer. I hated to wait on people.
China on the world stage, in terms of interaction with the rest of the world, has been relatively very new due to the long isolation period until Deng Xiaoping’s times.
I love picking people. I started Blackstone, and we had no people, and now we have with our portfolio companies about 750,000 people all over the world. Everybody who is at a senior level has ultimately been picked by me.
For future geopolitical stability and global prosperity, we need to build a culture of greater trust and understanding between China, America and the rest of the world.
Today, whenever I’m under pressure to make a decision on a transaction but I don’t know what the right one is, I try desperately to postpone it. I’ll insist on more information – on doing extra laps around the intellectual parking lot – before committing. I take the same approach with people, too.
Deals really have to do with the overlap of what one side wants and the other side wants, and it’s really just the discovery of where that overlap is and how you decide to get there.
Public service is a core value for people of my generation.
My father was very bright. My mother had enormous drive. Put that together, and that’s my gene pool.
Ironically, when a bunch of very smart people are sitting around a table for hours trying to figure out whether they should do something, that tends to not necessarily lead to the best results.
Doing a me-too business, because it’s you – the only person who cares about that is you. The market doesn’t care if it’s you. The market is pretty much being served. You better have something that the world doesn’t have, because even then, you might screw it up through your own ineptitude and inexperience.
We need sobriety, rationality, and civility in the discussions on the regulation of financial institutions so that the banks can return in a robust manner to their central role in funding the economy.
After years of studying French in school, one of my professors said he’d really appreciate it if I didn’t take any more French.
There are no patents in finance.
It’s wonderful to learn about new cultures and to be able to travel easily to so many countries.
In a financial crisis, only the Fed, as the lender of last resort, might stand between our economy and financial catastrophe. We must leave the Fed with the flexibility to provide liquidity in order to stop a financial panic.
Blackstone is a major client of many of the largest banks around the world.
It’s important that we educate Americans about how hedge funds and private equity play completely different roles.
Sleeping at night is not a specialty of entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur who is sleeping soundly, something bad is happening to that person; they just don’t know it’s happening yet.
My biggest job really is to figure other people out. I need to understand what makes a person tick.
The best investments are the easiest ones to approve.
I love houses. I’m not sure why.
I was in an interdisciplinary major – which was a new thing then – which was psychology, sociology, anthropology, and biology, which is really sort of the study of the human being.
In life, you’ll often find that having influence and providing sound advice is a good thing, even if it attracts criticism or requires some sacrifice.
We need to be able to identify and support young people who demonstrate interest and aptitude in entrepreneurship and business creation and give them tools to follow this path throughout their educational experience.
We have limited time, and we have to maximize it.
Education around entrepreneurship should start early, at secondary level, and be very robust by college level.
Business is usually a team sport. There isn’t one great person sitting there directing things. You can’t run an effective business like that.
I like being in warm weather. I find that relaxes me. I like being near water. I like sitting on a beach and sort of hearing the water, watching waves break, looking at the shimmering. I find that really relaxing.
I don’t feel like a wealthy person. Other people think of me as a wealthy person, but I don’t. I feel the same as when I was a fifth-year associate trying to make partner at Lehman Brothers. I haven’t changed.
In the charitable world, I find myself giving to large projects that I think can make a large-scale impact.
