“It’s not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating.”

It is decidedly not true that “nice guys finish last,” as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.

Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.

Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves.

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.

Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures.

Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.

Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.

If you’re going to take the attitude, I don’t think it will work, you will never do anything.

There is many a white man less fortunate and less well equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient – in America.

I was very lucky because she was the most beautiful woman in the world at the time. I photographed her very quickly, she was not easy as a model, but her beauty transcended anything I had seen before.

The questions that used to bother me at times, do not weigh anything before the immensity of a wake so close to the sky and filled with the wind of the sea

I couldn’t believe it the first time I heard one of my records on the radio, and I STILL love hearing anything I’m involved with on radio, and some of my best friends were from radio. But we were on different sides of that argument, there’s no question about that.

That’s the whole key to anything: Don’t be afraid to fail. And is not afraid to fail.

You know people. Most of them don’t hear anything. Those who hear – don’t listen. A few who listen – don’t understand. And those who could understand… they don’t care.

Follow your heart to discover what makes you happy, never let go of it, never devalue anything that is beautiful, and build a life that lets you be yourself.