A biography for Stephen A. Schwarzmanhasn’t been written yet.
“As long as you're excellent, things work out for you.”
“When deals go wrong, you have no one else to blame, so you yell at yourself, and you yell at others.”
“Today, whenever I'm under pressure to make a decision on a transaction but I don't know what the right one is, I try desperately to postpone it. I'll insist on more information - on doing extra laps around the intellectual parking lot - before committing. I take the same approach with people, too.”
“Preparing youth for employment requires training that is demand-driven to meet the needs of companies and ensure that young people are taught marketable skills.”
“If I get angry, it's obvious. I don't have to say much.”
“I'm not feeling undertaxed. Tax reform is an important issue. You have to have an inherent sense of fairness.”
“I'm doing my sit-ups and watching CNBC. Suddenly, somebody starts talking about me on television... The business has gone into a weird zone of visibility. For those of us who have done it for a long time, it's strange.”
“What you find when you live in the United States, you live in the West, is that when somebody fails, it's never their fault. They always like to blame somebody other than themselves for a failure.”
“To the extent that I can add value and make my country a better place, that's a good thing to do.”
“One of the rules I've learned is that struggling to try and think your way into making an investment is usually the best way to not have a great outcome.”
“In a financial crisis, only the Fed, as the lender of last resort, might stand between our economy and financial catastrophe. We must leave the Fed with the flexibility to provide liquidity in order to stop a financial panic.”
“In life, you'll often find that having influence and providing sound advice is a good thing, even if it attracts criticism or requires some sacrifice.”
“I can't micromanage what anybody pays or doesn't pay. But the concept that half of the public isn't involved with the income-tax system is somewhat odd and I'm not saying how much people should do, but we should all be part of the system.”
“I like creating new things.”
“I have a saying: There are no brave old people in finance. Because if you're brave, you mostly get destroyed in your 30s and 40s. If you make it to your 50s and 60s and you're still prospering, you have a very good sense of how to avoid problems and when to be conservative or aggressive with your investments.”
“I've learned that all investments have risk.”
“My first trip to China was 1990, and that was in a world where there were virtually no cars at all on the road, and everybody had bicycles.”
“We're so overregulated as a country that we just crushed our productivity.”
“When society starts moving in a way that becomes very negative, whether it's in the West or any other place, I've always found that it's very useful to have people around who actually know what's happening.”
“As you have more resources in life, it's your obligation to deploy those for the benefit of others.”