Nick Hanauer

“Tech innovation is something societies have to pursue as vigorously as they can. We have to innovate civically and socially at the same rate; otherwise, you create unfortunate disruptions, and that's where you have people opposing technological innovations.”

“If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers.”

“I have, oddly, two ski houses - trying to sell one.”

“The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.”

“I think the people who end up being extraordinarily successful - it's been my observation - tend to care enormously about status, particularly business people, right? Because the only point of money, you know, the only reason to have a 300-foot-long boat is because they're bigger than 200-foot-long boats.”

“Business people do two things with their time fundamentally. The first is that they try to create sales, right? Revenue, key to business. But the other thing they devote their time to equally is cost containment. That is to say, how to not create jobs. Because the fewer jobs you can create for the revenue you create, the more profit you make.”

“We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It's simply not true.”

“Diversity is America's most valuable resource. It is what makes us the most innovative nation on Earth.”

“Amazon didn't create any jobs. Amazon probably destroyed a million jobs in our economy.”

“You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.”

“Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.”

“I make an eight-figure income annually.”

“Once America's CEOs get back to the business of growing their companies rather than growing their share prices, shareholder value will take care of itself, and all Americans will share in the higher wages and other benefits of a renewed era of economic growth.”

“There is no earthly reason why Walmart and McDonald's and Walgreens and these other giant, profitable institutions should have one worker in need of public assistance. It's ridiculous.”

“Most people believe, mistakenly, that wealth in a human society has something to do with money, but that's not true. Money is simply a medium of exchange. Prosperity in a human society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems that we create for ourselves.”

“We became enthralled with the view that wealth trickled down from the top and that if you poured money into rich people, sort of like an ingredient, prosperity and jobs would squirt out of them like donuts. And if you understand economies in the 19th-century way, that view is plausible, and I think a lot of people accepted it.”

“One of the things that I think makes me successful is the way in which I collaborate with others. In my opinion, nothing great is ever the product of one mind. It's always a consequence of some sort of self-critical collaboration.”

“If Jeff Bezos and I had started Amazon.com in a poverty-stricken corner of Africa, there would have been no job creation because there would be no people to buy the stuff from Amazon.com. The difference here is the American middle class, which is by every measure the most extraordinary economic achievement in the history of the world.”

“Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption - ultimately, social and civic disruption.”

“I'm not the world's best philosopher. But I am one of the world's best strategists. I will put my strategic abilities against anybody on Earth.”