Carol Loomis

“From the minute I got to 'Fortune,' I loved my job. I knew myself to be a virtual dunce about business, and I was wide-eyed about how much I was learning.”

“A buyback is itself a special kind of acquisition, made at prices that are typically a bargain compared with those a company must pay for an outside purchase.”

“When they are employed wisely, derivatives make the world simpler because they give their buyers an ability to manage and transfer risk.”

“I will confess that almost all my inspiration has come from one emotion: fear. And terrible dread of the moment when I will finally be exposed as a fraud.”

“I have never met a document I don't like.”

“By late 1953, going to New York on vacation, I had lined up several Time Inc. interviews - and what they did was give me a lifelong appreciation of the importance of luck in getting a job.”

“Some managements do not even think of buybacks as an option. The idea of shrinking their equity base repels them. Their inclination instead is to get bigger, and this often leads them to pay rich prices for acquisitions that never earn their keep.”

“Every regulatory speech on derivatives takes a bow to their hedging 'benefits.' Less publicly, regulators pay their respects to derivative profits, a blessed relief from the banks' troubled loans to less-developed countries, highly leveraged companies, and real estate swingers.”

“Carl Icahn, corporate raider by trade, is creative, a scrambler, and certainly not to be underestimated.”