Lloyd Blankfein

“All you can do is the best you can do.”

“I don't look forward to a time when every politician, every legislator goes to Washington absolutely committed to an extreme point of view. Elected representatives are sent to Washington to compromise, not to never compromise.”

“As CEO of a big company, I have to be a kind of a champion of the interests of our people as insofar as their ability to do their job, to feel comfortable in their work environment, and to be able to fulfill their ambitions.”

“It's very hard to go out and make big investments to take advantage of the shale energy if we don't know if it's always going to be there, what price it's going to be there, whether the country's going to allow it to be exported, or whether it's going to go and affect subsidized U.S. manufacturing.”

“Change is often the agent of progress in ways we can't always readily see in the early days.”

“The list of things that are conventional today that I use every day that I thought would never make it is a very long list.”

“I'm the chocolate chip cookie king of the world.”

“Maybe bitcoin is a kind of a bubble. I don't like it. I'm not comfortable with it. I'm kind of an old dog to be absorbing that kind of a new trick.”

“I've learned over the years that there's a lot of things that work out pretty well that I don't love.”

“There's not a sport or activity in life where you have a really hard grip, you actually do better. Whether it's baseball or golf or kicking a ball, the looser you are, the further the thing goes... If you're tight, you're not necessarily better.”

“The best traders are not right more than they are wrong. They are quick adjusters. They are better at getting right when they are wrong.”

“Businesses will ultimately go where the markets and opportunities are.”

“When yields on corporate bonds are lower than dividends on stocks, that unnerves me.”

“Let me tell you, there's very few places where I don't have an agenda.”

“My - I grew up in - I grew up in public housing. My dad, for most of my life, worked for the post office, which was a terrific job to get because you couldn't lose your job.”

“If you had asked me, did I have everything nailed down and wired about what I wanted to do, and was I following some real plan? No. In fact, by the time I was in my mid-20s or even late-20s, and I was still in the law firm, I really was starting to get a little nervous that I didn't know what I was going to do.”

“With interest rates rising, gold doesn't pay an interest rate, but every other currency - it becomes not only less important to hold gold as an alternative, but more expensive to hold it as an insurance policy and so that will be a burden on the price of gold.”

“If you can't legislate, you can't deal with problems.”

“I got into Goldman really by acquisition because I had gone - I grew up in east New York in the Linden Projects - I did go to fancy schools, but my resume wasn't up to a Wall Street set of resumes. I went to college. I went to law school and practiced for a while.”

“You can see that all these people who did really great things failed six times or didn't get going until they were much older. I think that's much more instructive and educational.”