Top 268 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Bloomberg - Page 3

I was the one of those students who made the top half of the class possible.

After hard work, the biggest determinant is being in the right place at the right time.

In the game of life, when the final buzzer sounds, the only stat you carry with you is the number of assists you made.

I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world.

What you've got to do is be honest. Say what you believe. Give it to them straight. Just don't wuss out.

Keep in mind, Mike Bloomberg's kids and grandkids are breathing that air just like the coalminers' families are breathing that air. And the coalminers are the ones that have the conflict. They want their jobs, I understand that. They need to be able to feed their families. They also have to worry about their health and the health of their families.

If you think of all the publicity about the terrible tragedy of Virginia Tech, we have a Virginia Tech in this country every day. It's just spread across 50 states.

Design does matter. And not necessarily in a way that people realize. A lot of what you do, people take for granted - that a park has always been here, that a bicycle lane has always been there, that the street is safe or clean.

If you are honest with yourself and if you want to like what you see in the mirror, is you have to say what you really believe.

I have two daughters that are the loves of my life and I want to leave them a better world, a better country, a better state and a better city.

We have always had, remember, small groups of both parties that split off. There were the "blue dog Democrats." There were the "Dixie Democrats." Democrats were never going to, ever again, pull together.

I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.

Nobody should ever mistake and think that our country [USA] is weakened, or that authority is diffuse and unspecified, and that we are vulnerable.

In our democracy, near equality is no equality. Government either treats everyone the same, or it doesn't. And right now it doesn't.

What we shouldn't do is let people who want to come here make the decision themselves. America should be in control of its own borders.

Cities with clean air gain an economic advantage, because where people want to live and work, businesses want to invest.

We need to have more taxes, not less, and we need the taxes we have, certainly, to provide services - for defense and education and health care. We should not cut money here in order to cut taxes.

In business, when you fail at something, when something doesn't work, you say okay, we've learned that that's not a path to go down.

I never liked anyone who didn't have a temper. If you don't have a temper, you don't have any passion.

I think it's a sign that the establishment is going to have to change. For too long they never thought about the average person, because the average person is not organized.

You bet I did and I enjoyed it.

Buy what's deliverable, not what could be.

The truth of the matter is: you can create a great legacy, and inspire others, by giving it to philanthropic organizations.

Fighting climate change isn't just an obligation we owe to future generations. It's also an opportunity to improve public health - and drive economic growth - in the here and now.

I don't know why people carry guns. Guns kill people.

Government should not tell you what to do unless there's a compelling public purpose.

Getting the job done has been the basis for the success my company has achieved.

Now, you might say – “But why should we pay people for doing what they’re supposed to do?” It’s a fair question – but think of it this way: Every other anti-poverty program that’s been tried has failed to get the national poverty rate below 11 percent... Why shouldn’t we experiment with a program built around the one strategy that has proven time and again to work wonders – capitalism?

Most people won't have opportunity to do full-time service, but those lucky enough to have monetary wealth or some spare time really can make an enormous difference. As someone who's now in the public sector, and is seeing up-close-and-personal the real impact of what we do and what we give, I can tell you: every dollar and every volunteer help, in more ways than you can count.

If you want to do something for your children and show how much you love them, the single best thing-by far-is to support organizations that will create a better world for them and their children.

Most gun dealers follow the law and run honest businesses. But the statistics show that 1 percent of dealers sell more than half of all illegal guns. Why isn't the federal government going after them? Here's one reason: unlike mayors, members of Congress don't get a phone call in the middle of the night when a cop is shot and killed. They don't deliver the eulogies.

I think fully, that an independent candidate can't win in this country. The Constitution is structured for basically a two-party government, a two-party race.

We cannot continue. Our pension costs and health care costs for our employees are going to bankrupt this city.

Nobody wants a job where they don't have authority to go along with the responsibility. Quite the contrary. The more authority you give people, the better people you can attract, and the harder they're going to work, and the more loyal they are going to be.

Even though New York is the safest big city in the nation, there are still far too many illegal guns on our streets. Nearly all of them arrive from out of state - and most are sold by a small group of rogue gun dealers who refuse to obey federal laws.

I do not think that anybody should get paid for lousy performance. I've said that for a long time. If you work hard and you do good, you get paid well.

The main claim to fame, I think, of Bernie Sanders - who I've never met; I'm sure he's a pleasant guy - [is that] he's certainly not stupid.

I thought Jeb Bush would have made a good president. He was on the board of my foundation. He's very conservative, much too conservative for me.

Donald Trump says he wants to run America like he's running his business? God help us.

What I'm trying to do is to create excitement. So people looking at the Bloomberg's office building say, "My goodness, what's going on here? There's something different about this company." You want the employees to get psyched. And it's a chance to meet each other. My job is to get people to work together. With free food and no offices, even for Bloomberg, this might be considered one of the world's great corporate headquarters.

I was a Democrat before I was a Republican before I became an independent and I never changed my principles.

I like what I see when I look in the mirror. If I get sentimental, I look and say, "Uh. It's a bad day. They beat up on me," this, that, and the other thing. But ya know? We've spent one billion trying to convince people to not smoke. It's been phenomenally successful. We've probably saved millions of lives. There aren't many people that have done that. So, you know, when I get to heaven, I'm not sure I'm gonna stand for an interview. I'm going right in.

The next day after I got fired, literally the next day, I started a new company.

Despite its potential, the federal government has restricted funding for creating new cell lines - putting the burden of any future research squarely on the shoulders of the private sector. Government's most basic responsibility, however, is the health and welfare of its people, so it has a duty to encourage appropriate scientific investigations that could possibly save the lives of millions.

A lot can happen in a week - just read any Bible, .. On the seventh day, Election Day, unlike the Bible, we can't rest.

I make no secret of the fact that I was not a big Hillary Clinton supporter, but I thought in the two-way race between her and Donald Trump, that she should have been the president. But Trump promised a lot of things. And now he's six months in and hasn't passed a piece of legislation yet. Now, I personally have said we should help him. I didn't vote for him. I didn't think he was the right person. But once we have an election and he gets elected, then we have a responsibility as citizens to help him.

[Donald] Trump I've known because we cut ribbons together at golf courses and that sort of thing. He's a pleasant guy when you're with him. I've played golf with him twice, oh, probably 10, 15 years ago.

I've always wondered if people who block each other from expressing their opinions do so because they have so little confidence in their own. To me, encountering an opposing point of view is a chance to gain a deeper understanding of the issues at stake and develop my own point of view. But the first thing you've got to do is you've got to let people speak and you've got to listen. And that's what the first amendment is all about. That's what really distinguishes this country from others.

I tend to be reasonably blunt, maybe a little bit too much. But I just- I always respected people that tell the truth. And I've always wanted people to tell me the truth.

Other ways of looking at the environmental or climate change stuff is to frame it in the context that it is simultaneously a public health issue. One out of eight premature deaths worldwide happens because of air pollution. The worst power plant in America kills 278 people a year and causes 445 heart attacks. So, when we improve air quality we improve our lives, and at the same time we improve the climate as well. We must see climate policy from this perspective and not as an abstract threat that may threaten our survival in 100 years.

After all, the same steps that reduce carbon pollution also clean the air we breathe, which saves lives and reduces disease.

Ten years have passed since a perfect blue sky morning turned into the blackest of nights. Since then we've lived in sunshine and in shadow, and although we can never unsee what happened here, we can also see that children who lost their parents have grown into young adults, grandchildren have been born and good works and public service have taken root to honor those we loved and lost.

We have an expression in New York City government - "In God we trust, but for everyone else, bring data." It's so easy to pick up a sound byte and say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I believe that," without really thinking.

Someone once described the information business as exactly the opposite of sex. When it's good, it's still lousy.

Fifty percent of the world's population lives in cities. In a couple of decades, 70 percent of the world's population will be living in cities. Cities are where the problem is. Cities are where the solution is, where creativity exists to address the challenges and where they have most impact. This is why, in 2005, the C40 was founded, an organization of cities that address climate change. It started with 18 cities; now it's 91. Cities simply are the key to saving the planet.

We haven't had a world war in a long time. We do have mass movements of people out of Syria and North Africa. But, fundamentally, if you take Japan, you're complaining that the economy isn't booming, they'd like to have slightly higher inflation.

If you look at who starts new businesses, people that are innovative and risk takers. When you look at immigrants, you really have to be an innovator and a risk taker to leave everything you know in the old country and go to a new country. People that come here in America come here to work.

In fact, you see Hillary [Clinton] moving very far to the left. You see all the Republicans moving very far to the right.

Partisanship may be King in Washington - but the rest of us don't have to pay tribute.

Any friend of fossil is a friend of mine... We’ve got to do everything we can to get people out of their automobiles and into mass transit.