Ross Perot Quotes

Kat picked up a folder labeled Senior. "What are these? Bank records?" She did a double take, looking at Hale. "Did your dad really pay two million dollars to the campaign to elect Ross Perot?" "I..." Hale said, stumbling for words and thumbing through another file. "Wow. I guess my cousin Charlotte isn't really my cousin." "Don't worry," Kat said. "It looks like there might be a kid in Queens who is.

The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.

Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown. H. ROSS PEROT American billionaire and former U.S. presidential candidate

you will need a great deal of self-discipline not to lose your sense of balance, humility, and commitment.

The activist is not the person who says the river is dirty. The activist is the person who cleans up the river

Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown.

ROSS PEROT was the best thing that happened in American politics since Richard Nixon acquired a taste for gin. In both cases, the political dialogue of the day was enriched by spontaneous gibberish that entertained the wrong people and made the right ones question their faith.

You make more making computer chips than potato chips.

Eagles don't flock, you have to find them one at a time.

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

But influential business leaders were eager proponents of numbers-driven merit pay for teachers. Ross Perot, for example, pushed Dallas to implement a plan to use test scores alone to evaluate teachers and distribute pay increases. So it was ironic that private industry had, by the 1980s, mostly turned away from efforts to pay white-collar workers according to strict productivity measures, finding that such formal evaluation programs were too expensive and time-consuming to create and implement. Research showed that companies with merit pay schemes did not perform better financially than did organizations without it, nor were their employees happier. Instead, management gurus recommended that workers be judged primarily by the holistic standards of individual supervisors.

He was careful about the appearance of cashing in on his government service, refusing a directorship with McDonnell Douglas, the aerospace company. There was another road not taken in these months when Bush declined an offer from Ross Perot to run Perot’s oil business in Houston. “I’ll pay you a lot of money,” Perot told Bush, who considered the idea. (“This was before Ross became really strange,” Bush recalled.) The Bushes and the Perots were friendly, and the Perots once visited Kennebunkport as the Bushes’ guests. “I thought about it,” Bush recalled. When he did his due diligence with mutual acquaintances, however, Bush found no support for the idea of going to work for Perot. “I talked to some people, and they said, ‘For God’s sake don’t do that.’ So I said no, and thanked him profusely for thinking of me.” “Well, this is your big mistake,” Perot said, according to Bush. Speaking of himself in the third person, Perot went on: “You don’t say no to Ross Perot.

2000, Trump was seeking the Reform Party nomination, a movement which that year was spearheaded by retired professional wrestler Jesse Ventura. The Reform Party originated in the mid-90s as a vehicle for then-candidate Ross Perot to run for President in 1996 and it seemed the perfect vehicle for the politically ambitious, but independently minded, Donald J. Trump just four years later.

Today, the U.S. has lost one out of every four manufacturing jobs that existed before NAFTA—over 5 million, with 42,000 factories closed. A modest trade surplus with Mexico was replaced with a large, persistent deficit. . . . NAFTA’s new investor protections dramatically increased the ability of corporations to outsource entire factories to Mexico”—resulting in the “giant sucking sound” presidential candidate Ross Perot warned us about.

Conservative elites first turned to populism as a political strategy thanks to Richard Nixon. His festering resentment of the Establishment’s clubby exclusivity prepared him emotionally to reach out to the “silent majority,” with whom he shared that hostility. Nixon excoriated “our leadership class, the ministers, the college professors, and other teachers… the business leadership class… they have all really let down and become soft.” He looked forward to a new party of independent conservatism resting on a defense of traditional cultural and social norms governing race and religion and the family. It would include elements of blue-collar America estranged from their customary home in the Democratic Party. Proceeding in fits and starts, this strategic experiment proved its viability during the Reagan era, just when the businessman as populist hero was first flexing his spiritual muscles. Claiming common ground with the folkways of the “good ole boy” working class fell within the comfort zone of a rising milieu of movers and shakers and their political enablers. It was a “politics of recognition”—a rediscovery of the “forgotten man”—or what might be termed identity politics from above. Soon enough, Bill Clinton perfected the art of the faux Bubba. By that time we were living in the age of the Bubba wannabe—Ross Perot as the “simple country billionaire.” The most improbable members of the “new tycoonery” by then had mastered the art of pandering to populist sentiment. Citibank’s chairman Walter Wriston, who did yeoman work to eviscerate public oversight of the financial sector, proclaimed, “Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda” and gave “power to the people.” His bank plastered New York City with clever broadsides linking finance to every material craving, while simultaneously implying that such seductions were unworthy of the people and that the bank knew it. Its $1 billion “Live Richly” ad campaign included folksy homilies: what was then the world’s largest bank invited us to “open a craving account” and pointed out that “money can’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you marshmallows, which are kinda the same thing.” Cuter still and brimming with down-home family values, Citibank’s ads also reminded everybody, “He who dies with the most toys is still dead,” and that “the best table in the city is still the one with your family around it.” Yale preppie George W. Bush, in real life a man with distinctly subpar instincts for the life of the daredevil businessman, was “eating pork rinds and playing horseshoes.” His friends, maverick capitalists all, drove Range Rovers and pickup trucks, donning bib overalls as a kind of political camouflage.

In the 1992 presidential debate, third-party candidate Ross Perot famously warned about a 'giant sucking sound' of American jobs going south of the border to low-wage nations once trade protections were dropped. Perot was right, but no one in our government listened to him. Tariffs were ditched, and then Bill Clinton moved into the White House...He continued Reagan's trade policies and committed the United States to so-called free-trade agreements such as GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO, thus removing all the protections that had kept our domestic manufacturing industries safe from foreign corporate predators for two centuries.

The great concentration of wealth in the hands of the owners of chaebol has also had the consequence feared by the KMT in Taiwan: the entry into politics of a wealthy industrialist. This happened for the first time with the candidacy of Chung Ju Yung, founder of Hyundai, for president in the 1993 election. There is, of course, nothing wrong with a Ross Perot-style billionaire’s entering politics in a democracy, but the degree of concentrated wealth in the Korean business community has made other political actors on both the right and the left nervous. The result for Korea thus far has not been propitious; while losing the election to Kim Young Sam, the seventy-seven-year-old Chung was jailed in late 1993 on rather specious corruption charges—a warning to all would-be politicians among the business class that their participation in politics would not be welcome.74 Despite the apparent anomaly between its Chinese-style familistic culture and its large corporations, Korea continues to fit my overall hypothesis. That is, Korea, like China, is a familistic culture with a relatively low degree of trust outside kinship. In default of this cultural propensity, the Korean state has had to step in to create large organizations that would otherwise not be created by the private sector on its own. The large Korean chaebol may have been run more efficiently than the state-owned companies of France, Italy, and a number of countries in Latin America, but they were no less the product of subsidy, protection, regulation, and other acts of government intervention. While most countries would be quite happy to have had Korea’s growth record, it is not clear that they could achieve it using Korean methods.

would announce that NeXT was bringing the world a breakthrough. But the customers didn’t follow and NeXT wasn’t close to making a profit, which companies must do to thrive and grow. At a board meeting in spring 1991, company officials delivered more bad news about poor results. Investor Ross Perot interrupted the presentation with a blunt assessment: “So what you’re telling me is the cockpit’s on fire and the plane’s in a tailspin.

customers. But this girl was weaving in and out of the picnic tables, handing out chicken-sandwich samples to those of us who were already stuffing our faces with these same chicken sandwiches.   Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown. H. ROSS PEROT   “Ed,” Lisa said, “that's hilarious. I mean, all she has to do is walk about fifteen paces and offer those samples to the people who haven't eaten yet.” Hundreds of starving shopaholics were nearby,

Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success.

Cabbage Patch Kids were the must-have toy of 1983. They were dolls that resembled Ross Perot with hair, but they were more lifelike. I read somewhere that they were designed by Ronald Reagan to get children ready to love the mutant children who would be born after the nuclear war that his policies were sure to cause, but it is possible that was just an urban legend.

Eagles do not flock, you have to find them one at a time

Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown.

Years later, reading of another multimillionaire, Ross Perot, Rose Kennedy informed a grandson, “I read in the paper that he was going spend $100 million to buy the election. Your grandfather only spent ten.

Something in human nature causes us to start slacking off at our moment of greatest accomplishment. As you become successful, you will need a great deal of self-discipline not to lose your sense of balance, humility and commitment.

...if you go through life worrying about all the bad things that can happen, you soon convince yourself that it's best to do nothing at all." Ross Perot

...if you go through life worrying about all the bad things that can happen, you soon convince yourself that it's best to do nothing at all.

He stared out the window and found himself thinking of that old Randy Newman song, "It's Money That Matters." It was money that mattered, wasn't it? He shook his head. Times had changed. Twenty years ago-a decade ago, even-a rich man spending millions of dollars to get himself elected to public office would have been looked upon with suspicion and distrust. But in 1992, the town had voted overwhelmingly for Ross Perot, either buying completely into his "common man" persona and believing that the billionaire was more like them than were either of his two opponents, or else respecting and admiring his enormous wealth