Bill Walton Quotes

People who suffer learn to laugh about their sadness in public.

His ability to evoke Celtic pride was incredible. He would always talk about how all the old players called him up after an embarrasing performance and wanted to disassociate themselves from the Celtics. They wanted to mail in their championship rings, wanted their numbers removed from the rafters, and by this point there would be tears rolling down our cheeks and we'd want to kill.

He told us that he had made a mistake by leaving the word love out of the Pyramid of Success. And that love is the single most powerful and important word in our language and culture. And until we allow the power of love to supersede the love of power, none of us has any chance of success at all. There

I tried to teach them [his sons] that about the importance of self-discipline, and that the culture of yes is built on a foundation of no.

So here’s the final Wine Cellar Team: ’77 Kareem, ’03 Duncan, ’86 Bird, ’92 Jordan, ’85 Magic (starters); ’86 McHale, ’92 Pippen, ’09 Wade, ’77 Walton, ’10 LeBron, ’09 Paul, ’01 Allen (bench).

the value of a personal fortune is better understood in relation to the total gross national product of an individual’s era. By that measure, Carnegie was worth $112 billion in his day, far ahead of Bill Gates ($85 billion), Sam Walton ($42 billion), or Warren Buffett ($31 billion).

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

I am a product of the books that I've read throughout my life.

This process of wealth creation is offensive to levelers and planners because it yields mountains of new wealth in ways that could not possibly be planned. But unpredictability is fundamental to free human enterprise. It defies every econometric model and socialist scheme. It makes no sense to most professors, who attain their positions by the systematic acquisition of credentials pleasing to the establishment above them. By definition, innovations cannot be planned. Leading entrepreneurs—from Sam Walton to Mike Milken to Larry Page to Bill Gates— did not ascend a hierarchy; they created a new one. They did not climb to the top of anything. They were pushed to the top by their own success. They did not capture the pinnacle; they became it.

Understanding the varied use of the term ʾādām is essential to sorting out the early chapters of Genesis. But before we even get to that issue, there are two important observations to make. The first is that the word ʾādām is a Hebrew word meaning “human.” Regarding this observation, the fact that it is Hebrew indicates that the category designation (“human”) is imposed by those who spoke Hebrew. Adam and Eve would not have called each other these names because whatever they spoke, it was not Hebrew. Hebrew does not exist as a language until somewhere in the middle of the second millennium B.C. That means that these names are not just a matter of historical reporting, as if their names just happened to be Adam and Eve like someone else’s name is Bill or Mary. Although I believe that Adam and Eve are historical personages — real people in a real past — these cannot be their historical names. The names are Hebrew, and there is no Hebrew at the point in time when Adam and Eve lived. If these are not historical names, then they must be assigned names, intended by the Hebrew-speaking users to convey a particular meaning. Such a deduction leads us to the second observation. In English, if we read that someone’s name is “Human” and his partner’s name is “Life,” we quickly develop an impression of what is being communicated (as, for example, in Pilgrim’s Progress, where characters are named Christian, Faithful and Hopeful). These characters, by virtue of their assigned names, are larger than the historical characters to whom they refer. They represent something beyond themselves. Consequently, we can see from the start that interpretation may not be straightforward. More is going on than giving some biographical information about two people in history.

I told players at UCLA that we, as a team, are like a powerful car. Maybe a Bill Walton or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Michael Jordan is the big engine, but if one wheel is flat, we’re going no place. And if we have brand new tires but the lug nuts are missing, the wheels come off. What good is the powerful engine now? It’s no good at all.

They give me strength, they give me confidence, they give me hope, and they make me believe that tomorrow is like, going to be even better. -Grateful Dead

Sandra Bullock, who lives in Texas, owns Walton’s Fancy and Staple in Austin. It’s an upscale restaurant, bakery, floral shop, and event planning business.

In his book The Prime Movers,1 psychologist Edwin Locke identifies the core mental traits of great business leaders—Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Walt Disney, and J. P. Morgan, to name only a few. While a number of variables contributed to their success, Locke found one key trait they all shared: vision.

Do Magic’s Lakers win five titles with Jordan before Jordan thriving in Denver and Walton’s feet holding up in Portland? I’m going out on a limb and saying no. What a shame.

But there are other ways to think about the question of existence. For example, we might consider what we mean when we talk about a company “existing.” It would clearly not be the same as a chair existing. Does a company exist when it has filed the appropriate papers of incorporation? Does it exist when it has a building or a website? In some sense the answer to these would have to be yes. But many would prefer to speak of a company as existing when it is doing business. Consider what is communicated when a small retail business frames and displays the first dollar bill from the first sale. As another alternative, consider a restaurant that is required to display its current permit from the city department of health. Without that permit, the restaurant could be said not to exist, for it cannot do any business. Here existence is connected to the authority that governs existence in relation to the function the business serves. It is the government permit that causes that restaurant to exist, and its existence is defined in functional terms.

I do admit to worrying sometimes about future generations of the Waltons. I know it’s unrealistic of me to expect them all to get up and throw paper routes, and I know it’s something I can’t control. But I’d hate to see any descendants of mine fall into the category of what I’d call “idle rich”—a group I’ve never had much use for. I really hope that somehow the values both Helen and I, and our kids, have always embraced can be passed on down through the generations. And even if these little future Waltons don’t feel the need to work from dawn on into the night to stay ahead of the bill collector, I hope they’ll feel compelled to do something productive and useful and challenging with their lives. Maybe it’s time for a Walton to start thinking about going into medical research and working on cures for cancer, or figuring out new ways to bring culture and education to the underprivileged, or becoming missionaries for free enterprise in the Third World. Or maybe—and this is strictly my idea—there’s another Walton merchant lurking in the wings somewhere down the line.

Only Sampson and Walton failed to play more than four quality seasons, although Walton did win an MVP and Finals MVP and reinvent himself as the sixth man on an iconic team.