Beanie Baby Quotes

You don't understand!' Foaly objected. Trouble cut him off with a chop of his hand through the air. 'I never understand. That's why we pay you and your dork posse." Foaly objected again. 'They are not dorks!' Trouble found space for yet another holster. 'Really? That guy brings a Beanie Baby to work every day. And your nephew, Mayne, speaks fluent Unicorn.' 'They're not all dorks,' said Foaly, correcting himself.

Eric cheated on her with a girl dumber than a box of Beanie Babies and lied about it.

It is often said of the gold rush that the people who got rich were the shovel dealers who profited from the greed of the forty-niners. With Beanie Babies, most of the lasting personal fortunes came from selling books and tag protectors, not from speculating in plush.

The donations are usually anonymous, because while philanthropy is a source of pride, philanthropy as the exit strategy of last resort from a comically bad investment isn’t.

Nothing is more fun than to watch zealots go off the rails. They try to present themselves as rational, independent-minded persons like yourselves, balanced individuals who have examined our great wide world, weighed their options carefully, then coolly decided to devote their lives to Beanie Babies.

You can make a lot of money with a good cat." -Ty Warner

And so was this. These words—“Not in my presence will you talk about yourself in this way”—they don’t brush off easily. Nor should they. Sometimes a phrase lands in your soul with such weight it leaves the deepest impression. I collect these phrases like other people collect stamps and Beanie Babies. I fill the unlined pages of notebooks from Walmart with these phrases. These words that move me are treasures.

Charles Kindleberger explained the self-perpetuating feeding frenzy that develops when speculators start making money: 'There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich'.

Unless Ty Warner suddenly gets interested in his estate planning, his mostly estranged younger sister, now sixty-five and relying on aid to the indigent for medical bills and part-time jobs to feed her half-dozen adopted animals, will be the sole heir to the largest fortune in the history of stuffed animals.

Ty Inc.'s 1989 catalog had this on the back cover: "Warning: If anyone dare copy our creative designs and patents without written permission, ownership of your eternal soul passes to us and we have the right to negotiate the sale of said soul. Furthermore, our attorneys will see to it that life on Earth, as you know it, is not worth living.

All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.

When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community,” future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.” Brandeis’s words reflected some of the darkness of Kierkegaard’s worries from fifty years earlier and foretold some of that sullying paranoia that was still to come fifty years in the future. Thiel had read this article at Stanford. Many law students do. Most regard it as another piece of the puzzle that makes up American constitutional legal theory. But Peter believed it. He venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. Because he believed that’s where progress came from. Imagine for a second that you’re the kind of deranged individual who starts companies. You’ve created cryptocurrencies designed to replace the U.S. monetary system that somehow turned into a business that helps people sell Beanie Babies and laser pointers over the internet and ends up being worth billions of dollars. Where others saw science fiction, you’ve always seen opportunities—for real, legitimate business. You’re the kind of person who is a libertarian before that word had any kind of social respectability. You’re a conservative at Stanford. You’re the person who likes Ayn Rand and thinks she’s something more than an author teenage boys like to read. You were driven to entrepreneurship because it was a safe space from consensus, and from convention. How do you respond to social shaming? You hate it. How do you respond to petulant blogs implying there is something wrong with you for being a gay person who isn’t public about his sexuality? Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?

I told them dinner was ready and went to the living room, where Rachel and Richard were hiding out. "You realize, I suppose, that both your names begin with the same letter." I poured them a glass of wine. Each. I'm generous that way. Richard grinned. "Yes, we noticed that early on. We also noticed that if we have a child and give him or her a name that also begins with R that we can say we have the three Rs covered." "Wow, and maybe you can all have matching propeller beanies." I was covering the fact I was suddenly excited at the thought of my sister having children. I had accepted it was never going to happen, and it was fine, but a baby is a baby, am I right? Rachel shrugged. "Why not? How about Rapunzel, or Requiem, or Rumpelstiltskin?" "Or Random, Rorschach, or Ritalin." Richard liked this game. "You could go techy and call them RAM or ROM." "Or medical and call them Rheumatism or Rabies or Rubella.

Who?” “Bill Judd Jr.” “Oh, noooo.” Round, Swedish oooo’s. “Miz Sweet, when we were going through Judd Sr.’s office, we found some invoices on your computer, for chemicals that were apparently used in an ethanol plant out in South Dakota…” “I heard about it on TV. That was the same one? The one where they were making drugs?” “Yes, it was,” Virgil said. “Oh, nooo.” The sound was driving him crazy; she sounded like a bad comedian. “Who in town knew about the ethanol plant?” She turned her face to one side and put a hand to her lips. “Well, the Judds, of course.” “Both of them?” Virgil asked. “Well…Junior set it up, but Senior knew about it.” He pressed. “Are you sure about that?” “Well, yes. He signed the checks.” “Did you see him signing the checks?” Virgil asked. “No, but I saw the checks. It was his signature…” “Do you remember the bank?” She shook her head. “No, no, I don’t.” She frowned. “I’m not even sure that the bank name was on the checks.” “Did you ever talk to Junior about that?” “No. It wasn’t my business,” she said. “They wanted to keep it quiet, because, you know, when ethanol started, it sounded a little like the Jerusalem artichoke thing. The Judds were involved in that, of course.” “So how quiet did they keep it?” Virgil asked. “Who else knew? Did you tell anybody?” He saw it coming, the noooo. “Oh, noooo…Junior told me, don’t talk about this, because of my father. So, I didn’t.” “Not to anybody?” Her eyes drifted. She was thinking, which meant that she had. “It’s possible…my sister, I might have told. I think there might have been some word around town.” “It’s really important that you remember…” She put her hand to her temple, as though she were going to move a paper clip with telekinesis, and said, “I might have mentioned it at bridge. At our bridge club. That a plant was being built, and some local people were involved.” “All right,” Virgil said. “So who was at the bridge club?” “Well, let me see, there would have been nine or ten of us…” She listed them; he only recognized one of the names. WHEN HE WAS DONE with Sweet, he strolled up the hill to the newspaper office. He pushed in, and found Williamson behind the business counter, talking to a woman customer. Williamson looked past the woman and snapped, “What do you want?” “I have a question, when you’re free.” “Wait.” Williamson was wearing a T-shirt and had sweat stains under his arms, as though he’d been lifting rocks. “Take just a minute.” The customer was trying to dump her Beanie Baby collection locally—ten years too late, in Virgil’s opinion—and wanted the cheapest possible advertisement. She got twenty words for six dollars, looking back and forth between Virgil and Williamson, and after writing a check for the amount, said to Virgil, “I’d love to hear your question.” Virgil looked at her over his sunglasses and grinned: “I’d love to have you, but I’m afraid it’s gotta be private, for the moment.” “Shoot.” She looked at Williamson, who shrugged, and she said, “Oh, well.” WHEN SHE’D GONE out the door, Williamson said, “I’m working. You can ask me out back.” “You still pissed about the search?

Warner once offered to take their five-year-old daughter out for ice cream, but when he pulled up in his Rolls-Royce, he asked her if she had any money.

[Peggy Gallagher] was also appearing once a month for two hours on WGN Radio [...] During one summer show, a caller asked, 'Do you think there is a seasonal cycle for Beanie Babies?' 'It’s not different than any other kind of investment—the stock market or the commodities market,' was Gallagher’s reply. Then she explained that she used to be a trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. 'There are peaks and valleys. It’s an investment for people. There’s nobody as big as the market. The Hunt [brothers] tried to do it with the silver market. There is nobody bigger than the market. The prices have stabilized a bit right now, but now they’re starting to get more active. So it’s just like any other type of investment'.

The Bradford Exchange—a knockoff of [Joseph] Segel’s [Franklin Mint] business—created a murky secondary market for its collector plates, complete with advertisements featuring its “brokers” hovering over computers, tracking plate prices. To underscore the idea of these mass-produced tchotchkes as upmarket, sophisticated investments, the company deployed some of its most aggressive ads (which later led to lawsuits) in magazines like Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Architectural Digest. A 1986 sales pitch offered “The Sound of Music,” the first plate in a new series from the Edwin M. Knowles China Company, at a price of $19.50. Yet the ad copy didn’t emphasize the plate itself. Rather, bold type introduced two so-called facts: “Fact: ‘Scarlett,’ the 1976 first issue in Edwin M. Knowles’ landmark series of collector’s plates inspired by the classic film Gone With the Wind, cost $21.60 when it was issued. It recently traded at $245.00—an increase of 1,040% in just seven years.” And “Fact: ‘The Sound of Music,’ the first issue in Knowles’ The Sound of Music series, inspired by the classic film of the same name, is now available for $19.50.” Later the ad advised that “it’s likely to increase in value.” Currently, those plates can be had on eBay for less than $5 each. In 1993 U.S. direct mail sales of collectibles totaled $1.7 billion

Beanie Babies?” Sawyer’s mother shoveled some chow mein into her mouth and grinned, chewing steadily. “How do you even know what those old things are?” “I pay attention in history class.

Octavian ripped open a Beanie Baby and pronounced grave omens and hard times ahead, but predicted the camp would be saved by an unexpected hero (whose initials were probably OCTAVIAN).

The speculative boom for Beanie Babies has resulted in an unsurpassed volume of high-quality, perfectly preserved, monetarily worthless plush animals for children most in need of the comfort of something soft.

The donations are usually anonymous, because while philanthropy is a source of pride, philanthropy as the exit strategy of last resort from a comically bad investment isn't.

Like the Velveteen Rabbit of Margery Williams's perennially best-selling children's book, plush makers are animated by the prospect of their creations becoming the first thing a child loves and values.

But I was struck by the drama he created and his personal flair. His unique presence and obvious intelligence started to suck me into his drama, almost as if I were auditioning for a part.

Kids who grew up in Naperville remember trading them in the first half of 1995, close to a year before the rest of the country had heard of them, and a few teachers had banned Beanies from their classrooms because they'd become a distraction.

When Saint Augustine was formulating his doctrine of Original Sin, all he had to do was look at people as they are originally. Originally, they’re children. Saint Augustine may have had a previous job – unmentioned in his Confessions – as a preschool day-care provider. But it’s wrong to use infantile as a pejorative. It’s the other way around. What children display is adultishness. Children are, for example, perfectly adultish in their self-absorption. Tiny tots look so wise, staring at their stuffed animals. You wonder what they’re thinking. Then they learn to talk. What they’re thinking is, My Beanie Baby!

A teddy bear, to me . . . is endless and unconditional love.