Wall Street Movie Quotes

I'm living in this world. I'm what, a slacker? A "twentysomething"? I'm in the margins. I'm not building a wall but making a brick. Okay, here I am, a tired inheritor of the Me generation, floating from school to street to bookstore to movie theater with a certain uncertainty. I'm in that white space where consumer terror meets irony and pessimism, where Scooby Doo and Dr. Faustus hold equal sway over the mind, where the Butthole Surfers provide the background volume, where we choose what is not obvious over what is easy. It goes on...like TV channel-cruising, no plot, no tragic flaws, no resolution, just mastering the moment, pushing forward, full of sound and fury, full of life signifying everything on any given day...

I used to love that movie Wall Street and the line ‘Greed is good.’ Honestly, the only thing greed got me was five years in prison, the loss of my wife and possessions, and the company I loved,” Brad said slumping in his chair with his head down.

Cautionary tale ladies, never marry a man who quotes the movie Wall Street like it’s his Bible. If Gordon Gekko is his idol, it’s time to pack your bags. Trust me, I wish somebody had given me the heads up.

Every morning a great wall of fog descends upon the city of San Francisco. It begins far out at sea. It forms over the Farallons, covering the sea lions on their rocks, and then it sweeps onto Ocean Beach, filling the long green bowl of Golden Gate Park. The fog obscures the early morning joggers and the lone practitioners of tai chi. It mists up the windows of the Glass Pavilion. It creeps over the entire city, over the monuments and movie theaters, over the Panhandle dope dens and the flophouses in the Tenderloin. The fog covers the pastel Victorian mansions in Pacific Heights and shrouds the rainbow-colored houses in the Haight. It walks up and down the twisting streets of Chinatown; it boards the cable cars, making their clanging bells sound like buoys; it climbs to the top of Coit Tower until you can’t see it anymore; it moves in on the Mission, where the mariachi players are still asleep; and it bothers the tourists. The fog of San Francisco, that cold, identity-cleansing mist that rolls over the city every day, explains better than anything else why that city is what it is.

I’ve seen this movie before. The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.

I came across Nell like you would a Robert Mapplethorpe at a street art fair, gobsmacked that something so valuable would be lumped in with a bunch of other crap like that. She’d been slumped against the bathroom wall in Butterfields, a dorm we later took to calling Butterfingers, for the lacrosse team residents who manhandled girls made Gumby-legged by Popov vodka. Even with her mouth hanging open, her tongue dry and pebbled white from all the medically sanctioned stimulants, there was no question that she had a movie star face. “Hey,” I said, my

Martin shampooed his hair and wished his life was more like a movie. Everything in a movie completed. Relationships began, they developed and they ended or went on happily forever. All in less than two hours. Life, though was not like a movie, it was ragged, an outdated map with new streets added whose direction you could never quite discern, or a maze filled with suddenly appearing walls and aimless corridors. Even when a movie didn’t have a happy ending, it had a logical ending that you could live with. Life had endings that you didn’t know were endings, or endings that you thought were endings and then they weren’t.

The glory of Manhattan which Willie had seen from the airplane was nowhere visible at Broadway and Fiftieth Street when he came up out of the subway. It was the same old dirty crowded corner: here a cigar store, there an orange-drink stand, yonder a flickering movie marquee, everywhere people with ugly tired faces hurrying in a bitter wind that whirled flapping newspapers and little spirals of dry snow along the gutters. It was all as familiar to Willie as his hand. The reception room of the Sono-phono Studios, some seven feet square, consisted of plasterboard walls, a plasterboard door in back, a green metal desk, and a very ugly receptionist with a plasterboard complexion, chewing a large wad of pink gum. “Yeah? What can I do for you?

He knew nothing about werewolves but what was in the movies. He hadn’t even believed they existed until he was attacked. The tall dude, though, knew. Joshua managed to force his body to make a left-hand turn at the corner, and again once he was across the street, and then a third time. He came looping past the Kitchen Kitsch where the tall dude was standing in the hole in the wall. “You’re really conflicted about this running away part, aren’t you?” the dude said as Joshua dashed past him. “Yes!” He tried to put on the brakes but his body kept running. He could smell his own blood on the man and his body wanted nothing to do with that. The dude wasn’t standing in the hole as Joshua came looping back toward the Kitchen Kitsch a second time. Joshua was afraid he’d lost the man. He was so focused on the opposite side of the street that he nearly ran into the glass door that opened out in front of him. A hand caught him, jerking him into the building.

— The opening argument was one of Devlin-Brown’s favorite parts of a trial. In a case like this, it was sometimes all that mattered. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had a formula for it, a system that was passed down through generations of prosecutors. It started with what they called “the grab”—a quick, two-minute summary of the case, meant to capture the jury’s attention. The grab could begin in one of two ways. The first was with a big thematic idea, as in, “This is a case about greed.” Devlin-Brown preferred what he called the “It was a dark and stormy night” beginning, which dropped the jurors right into a dramatic scene. Just like in a movie. On this day, his version began with, “It was July of 2008.” He spoke in a gentle, even voice. “Mathew Martoma, the defendant, was one of about a thousand people packed into a crowded Chicago convention hall waiting for an expert on Alzheimer’s disease to take the stage.” Sidney Gilman, he explained, was at an international Alzheimer’s conference to unveil the results of a hotly anticipated drug trial. The results of

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

My heart lurches as all the implications sink in. I’ve seen this movie before. The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.

After years of being hounded by the same question—What’s the next new device?—Cook had finally delivered his answer: There isn’t one. His message hadn’t been aimed at Main Street; it was for Wall Street. He wanted investors to see that Apple was making a major shift. Rather than its products creating glory, Cook outlined a future in which Apple basked in the glory of others. He didn’t want to merely update the iPhone every year; he wanted people to pay Apple subscription fees for the movies they watched on that iPhone. He didn’t want to enable digital payments; he wanted Apple to be the processor of every transaction. And he didn’t want Apple to make the screen on which people read articles; he wanted to sell access to the magazines they read. For years, Cook had seen new revenue opportunities in each of those businesses. He had plotted a path to get there, buying Beats in 2014, courting Hollywood agents and directors in the years that had followed, and forging strong ties with Goldman Sachs throughout that time. He saw in all of it a way to shed the burden of a device business that was running out of juice and enter a world of services that promised unlimited growth.

Heller,” he called after me. “I don’t know what you have up your sleeve, but I suggest you not bother. Like Sun Tzu said: ‘All battles are won or lost before they’re fought.’ ” “He never said it,” I pointed out. “That’s from the movie Wall Street.” “Doesn’t make it wrong.” “Well,” I said. “I guess we’ll see.

Everything in a movie completed. Relationships began, they developed and they ended or went on happily forever. All in less than two hours. Life, though, was not like a movie, it was ragged, an outdated map with new streets added whose direction you could never quite discern, or a maze filled with suddenly appearing walls and aimless corridors. Even when a movie didn't have a happy ending, it had a logical ending that you could live with. Life had endings that you didn't know were endings, or endings that thought were endings and then they weren't.

The muscles of Sue’s legs tensed, and the saddle lurched. One of the little girls screamed. And then the Tyrannosaur came down from the leap that had carried her over the besieged Wardens. Sue landed with one clawed foot on the street, and the other came down squarely on the Caddy’s hood, like a falcon descending upon a rabbit. There was an enormous sound of shrieking metal and breaking glass, and the saddle lurched wildly again. I leaned over to see what had happened. The car’s hood and engine block had been compacted into a two-foot-thick section of twisted metal. Even as I looked, Sue leaned over the car in a curiously birdlike movement, opened her enormous jaws, and ripped the roof off. Inside was Li Xian, dressed in a black shirt and trousers. The ghoul’s forehead had a nasty gash in it, and green-black blood had sheeted over one side of his face. His eyes were blank and a little vague, and I figured he’d clipped his head on the steering wheel or window when Sue brought his sliding car to an abrupt halt. Li Xian shook his head and then started to scramble out of the car. Sue roared again, and the sound must have terrified Li Xian, because all of his limbs jerked in spasm and he fell on his face to the street. Sue leaned down again, her jaws gaping, but the ghoul rolled under the car to get away from them. So Sue kicked the car, and sent it tumbling end over end three or four times down the street. The ghoul let out a scream and stared up at Sue in naked terror, covering his head with his arms. Sue ate him. Snap. Gulp. No more ghoul. “What’s with that?” Butters screamed, his voice high and frightened. “Just covering his head with his arms? Didn’t he see the lawyer in the movie?” “Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them,” I replied, turning Sue around. “Hang on!” I rode the dinosaur into the stream of zombies following in the Wardens’ wake and let her go to town. Sue chomped and stomped and smacked zombies fifty feet through the air with swinging blows of her snout. Her tail batted one particularly vile-looking zombie into the brick wall of the nearest building, and the zombie hit so hard and so squishily that it just stuck to the wall like a refrigerator magnet, arms and legs spread in a sprawl.

One group of senior directors took an extravagant junket to Uruguay to kill doves. They especially loved killing doves. Why? It couldn’t have been the challenge. The group paid a Uruguayan farmer who had thousands of doves on his property to allow them to shoot there. One of the managers told me the air was so thick with doves that the hunting resembled a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds.

Ever since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher lightened all the regulations for making money, the gap between the haves and have not has grown. Inspired by a 1980’s Hollywood movie, the mantra for Wall Street became “greed is good.

In 1900, George and Clara Morris and their four children, Samuel, Selma, Marcella, and Malvina, left Bucharest, Romania, and boarded a ship for New York City. When they arrived in the United States, they stayed in New York City for a few weeks and then decided to move to Los Angeles, where George wanted to become a director in the movie business. Along the way, in St. Louis, Clara had another baby and died in childbirth. George put the children in an orphanage there before heading on to Los Angeles, where he promised to send for them. The children stayed in the orphanage until the oldest child, Marcella, was able to make enough money to get them all out. She moved them back to New York City, where she became the first Jewish female to hold a seat on the Wall Street stock exchange, where she made millions of dollars that she later gave to Brandeis University. She lived with her sisters in an apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village and had a house in Southampton, New York, and somewhere along the way had an affair with J. P. Morgan. Interesting? You bet. But don’t worry about remembering any of this, because it’s 90 percent wrong, which I didn’t find out until years later.

There’s the horror-movie version: a shadow with a knife, the one who escaped from the hospital on the hill during that storm. It’s the person living in the walls. In mystery novels, it might be the smiling stranger, the one with the passing knowledge of poisons. It’s the relative left out of the will, or the one recently added to it. It’s the jealous colleague at the museum who wants to be the first to announce the new archeological discovery. It’s the overly helpful person who follows the detective around. On the all-murder, true-crime channel, it’s the new neighbor with the boat, the one in his midforties to midfifties with the tan who has no past and who recently purchased a human-sized cooler. It’s the person who lives in the shack in the woods. It’s the unseen figure on the corner of the street. On all crime shows, it’s usually the third person the cops interview. It’s the one you sort of think it is. In life, the murderer is anyone. The reasons, the methods, the circumstances—the paths to becoming a murderer are as numerous as the stars. Understanding this is the first step to finding a murderer. You have to shut down the voices in your mind that say, “It has to be this person.” Murderers aren’t a type. They’re anyone.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She lived in a town four hours away from here, in a house on a street named Daisy Lane. She had a mother and a father and her own room and a TV and sometimes could stay up late to watch movies on the weekend if she ate all her dinner. She had a cat and three best friends and wanted to work with dolphins. She had posters of them on her walls, and her computer screen saver was one, a dolphin with warm eyes and a sweet grin gleaming out at you. All her stuffed animals, except for the stupid ones her grandparents gave her, were dolphins. One day she went to the aquarium. She wore blue jeans, a white shirt (no logos, no designs), and sneakers (white, with white socks). She went with her fifth-grade class, and since it was three days before her 10th birthday, she thought her friends would let her sit by the window on the bus. They didn't. And when they got to the aquarium, there weren't any dolphins and her friends got mad because she wouldn't loan them her lip gloss; it was new, it tasted like cream soda, and she didn't want to share. She was a selfish little girl. She paid for it.

Then there’s southern California. Maybe the shadow of Hollywood tints truth and fiction beyond recognition. Maybe crooked executives believe they can do what they please since a continent separates them from Wall Street. Maybe the sunshine triggers a criminal giddiness. Or maybe it’s just coincidence. But a disproportionate number of the financial scandals of the last generation have blossomed in the land of the lotus eaters. The collapse of Lincoln Savings & Loan, Charles Keating’s bank, cost taxpayers $3.4 billion; other California S&L failures cost tens of billions more. Barry Minkow came from the San Fernando Valley to fleece bankers and investors of several million dollars while he was still a teenager. And movie accounting is notoriously corrupt.

Ned’s bedroom was a museum. It was hard to look at any one thing. There were shelves and shelves of books; of stacked white cardboard boxes he’d labeled, in as many colored markers and fancy letters as there were boxes, COMIX; posters for things Dorry had never heard of, and didn’t know if they were comics or movies or what, but one—her head went light—she did: Sandman; and one wall, the entire wall, floor to ceiling around two windows, was a painting of the tops of the houses across the street, the edge of a tree in full summer leaf, birds, a cat watching from a high balcony, as though the wall itself were one huge window. “I do a new one every year,” Ned said. “This was my first tramp loyal,” and Dorry spent a good hour that night online, figuring out that he was saying trompe l’oeil.

In two years of research the best example of self-disruption I can find is Netflix. Netflix’s transition to streaming from DVD rental by mail was not nearly as smooth as many would like to remember it, but in hindsight it appears genius. Netflix was founded in 1997 as a DVD mail service and pretty rapidly rose to take huge market share from local video stores who could not compete with its vast range of titles. People soon appreciated the appeal of no late fees, the ability to have several movies out at the same time, as well as its unlimited consumption tariff. Always keen to keep abreast of the latest technology, in 2007 Netflix spent about $40 million to build data centres and to cover the cost of licensing for the initial streaming titles (Rodriguez, 2017). When internet speeds allowed, it introduced streaming as an additional service for its existing subscribers. Monthly fees remained the same, but those with more expensive tariffs were given access to more hours of streamed content. While it added something for free, it also helped give people a reason to upgrade to more expensive plans. Growth was impressive, the video libraries of streamed content rose, the share price rose impressively from $3 in 2007 to over $42 in 2011, and life was good. In September 2011 Netflix made a very bold move. It created two tariffs, and moved all its US subscribers onto two separate plans: the original DVD-by-mail service was to be called Qwikster; the other was a streaming service for a lower monthly fee. The market was shocked, and by December the stock price was below $10 and the company was in pieces. The company rapidly lost higher revenue DVD subscribers and within nine months profits were down by 50 per cent (Steel, 2015). And yet slowly things changed. First, the lower prices suddenly appealed to a much wider market, bringing in far more paying customers, allowing Netflix to buy more content and to slowly raise prices. Then Netflix started making its own original content, clearing out global streaming rights, and then at a flick of a switch it was able to expand globally. If Netflix had not disrupted itself it would be a very different company. It would rely on a massive physical distortion system, with very high costs. It would probably have lost out massively to YouTube and would have withered away as a mail-order DVD supplier. Instead, Netflix’s share price is now nearly $200, five times more than it was when it bravely self-disrupted, it operates in 190 countries, makes nearly $9 billion in revenue from over 110 million customers (Feldman, 2017). Today DVDs represent only 4 per cent of Netflix’s users. It seems that in 2011, when Wall Street was demanding the resignation of Reed Hastings for reinventing the business, they were wrong. From this you can see the pressure this approach places on leaderships, the confidence you need to have, the degree to which this antagonizes the market and everyone around you. This move takes balls. The confidence, conviction, and aggression, to change before you have to create your own future, is remarkable.

Focus on what you are good at; delegate all else. Jobs doesn't direct animated movies or woo Wall Street. He concentrates on what he's good at.

I loved to read and write, and when I was young I lived half my life in books, movies, and my imagination. In elementary school I didn’t want to play with other kids; I was shy and sensitive and I found them intimidating. So my mom spoke to the school librarian. Tina Sekavic agreed to allow me to hang out in the library, so I spent the next few years reading biographies about women who had changed the world like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, and others. (My mom had initially suggested this, but I quickly became fascinated.) I was moved by their bravery and determination, and I decided right then and there, I didn’t want to settle for an ordinary life. I craved adventure; I wanted to leave my mark.

I loved to read and write, and when I was young I lived half my life in books, movies, and my imagination. In elementary school I didn’t want to play with other kids; I was shy and sensitive and I found them intimidating. So my mom spoke to the school librarian. Tina Sekavic agreed to allow me to hang out in the library, so I spent the next few years reading biographies about women who had changed the world like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, and others. (My mom had initially suggested this, but I quickly became fascinated.) I was moved by their bravery and determination, and I decided right then and there, I didn’t want to settle for an ordinary life. I craved adventure; I wanted to leave my mark.

For the most part, these were men who had risked it all to attain enormous success. Risked, past tense. Now they were coasting. They were safe. There was no jugular to their day-to day lives. They could get any woman they desired, buy anything they wanted, make movies, live in mansions, acquire and disembowel huge corporations. They craved the adrenaline of the gamble: that was what kept them coming back. It was much more than just a game—it was escapism, adventure, fantasy. It had become an escape for me as well. A way to avoid “growing up,” which meant, at least to my father, succumbing to a life of thankless obligations. I decided that this game was the next level of my education. Everything that passed in front of my eyes was another lesson in economics, in psychology, in entrepreneurship, in the American dream.

I loved to read and write, and when I was young I lived half my life in books, movies, and my imagination. In elementary school I didn’t want to play with other kids; I was shy and sensitive and I found them intimidating. So my mom spoke to the school librarian. Tina Sekavic agreed to allow me to hang out in the library, so I spent the next few years reading biographies about women who had changed the world like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, and others.

And then it happened. One of my TikToks, a video about very specific red flags in men, blew up. I declared that any man who calls The Wolf of Wall Street his favorite movie of all time, or who has an obsession with Tom Brady—not the Bucs or the Pats, just Tom Brady—should be jailed (a clear and obvious joke, but also … is it?). And it went viral.