Top 268 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Bloomberg - Page 4

Look at the streets! The people have smiles on their faces, they're hustling and bustling and going places, they're well-dressed, there's lots of construction going on. It's kind of hard to feel sorry for an economy like this.

America was built by immigrants. Almost nobody that I know is any more than three generations, maybe four generations, American.

Basically, the UBR is a relic of an earlier vision for UDDI. The original vision for UDDI was as a standard that would help companies conduct business with each other in an automated fashion. The idea was that companies could publish how they wanted to interact, and other companies could find that information and use it to establish a relationship.

In New York City, a lot of people think "the great outdoors" is the area between your front door and a taxi cab.

I think [Winston] Churchill said it was " [democracy] the worst of all systems except for all the others." And that's probably true. It's never gone easily.

When I care about something, I care about something. I think I have an obligation as an American to - and as a citizen, as - as a human being, to help others. Smoking is going to kill a billion people this century. I've put six hundred million dollars from my own money into trying to stop the tobacco companies from getting kids to smoke and convincing adults that it's not in their health.

In science, a path that turns out to be a dead end is very useful because you don't devote resources to focusing on that; you go elsewheres.

Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be - given the devastation it is wreaking - should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.

The problem of dealing with the financial industry is being addressed today. You can measure it with interest rates coming down. You can measure it with the quantity of loans, and that sort of thing. The problem is, that nobody wants to take the loans. Once the banks are willing to give it, that's only half the problem.

Five years have come, and five years have gone, and still we stand together as one. We come back to this place to remember the heartbreaking anniversary - and each person who died here - those known and unknown to us, whose absence is always with us.

The fact is, the most painful and tragic lesson of the 20th century was that regimes based on racial superiority and religious hatred can't be trusted to keep their word to the international community.

I'd love to have a president who really was out there leading and traveling around the world campaigning for joint climate change action. Even the Chinese government is trying to get people to stop polluting. And I think the federal government level in China is acting more responsibly than the American government.

We need people from all around the world. We need entrepreneurs, we need students that we're educating in our schools that we then throw out and we should make sure they can stay here. If we don't have the new flux of immigrants, nobody's going to create the jobs for the Americans who are currently out of work.

We need our president to be successful because our futures are all tied to the success of America, which means America's government, which means, in essence, the president.

Throughout our history each and every generation has expanded upon the freedoms won by their parents and grandparents. Each and every generation has removed some of the barriers to full participation in the American dream. And the next great barrier standing before our generation is the prohibition on marriage for same-sex couples

The public wants elected officials who have character. The public wants elected officials who are willing to stand up and say things, even if they don't agree with them.

I cannot for the life of me understand why the American market keeps going up. Our economy has some real challenges. The infrastructure's falling apart. We're destroying jobs with technology. We are keeping the best and the brightest from around the world from coming to America to create new jobs and create new businesses. All of those things would give you pause to worry about the future.

New York has been, and will continue to be, a magnet for people from all over the world. This is where the arts, business, research and technology converge to create the world's foremost urban economy.

The one thing computers have done is let us make bigger mistakes. We have to be careful not to depend on our machines.

Politicians generally respond to who is going to help them get elected and re-elected.

Don't think that I'm - I'd- I'm infallible. Will always make mistakes.

I don't have a problem with a woman being president; I just want the best candidate.

We all know that election reform takes time. That's because those who have benefited from the system are the ones who fight hardest to preserve it. So if we're going to succeed, we need an independent coalition of citizens who believe in reform, who believe that our election laws should treat every voter equally, who believe that low levels of competition and participation are not healthy for democracy. The Independence Party is helping to build that coalition and I am happy to join you in doing so.

We're America, and we have to stop worrying about what happens overseas, and to be optimistic, even though nobody should think we're not going to have some difficult times.

We have an energy policy - we're transferring our wealth to overseas to a bunch of countries that don't have the same values as us. In some cases, they're using our money to finance terrorism against us.

Jeb Bush is very good on immigration, he's very good on education. He's a smart guy.

For sure I would prefer Trump had not withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. But the fight against climate change is really done at the local level - whether it's cities, local governments or the private sector, corporate and individual. No matter what Trump says, nobody is going to go back and take the scrubber out or change back to polluting. The damage that Trump can do is if there are countries that are on the fence about whether they want to address the issue, this gives the naysayers, the doubters, those that don't want to do anything, a little more ammunition.

We've continued progress in the six months since Trump got elected, and the good thing about what we're doing is that success begets success. As we bring down greenhouse gases, for example, we've closed half of the coal-fired power plants in the country in recent years. There's more impetus to try to close the other half because you can see that it is working. So, you know, I had hoped that Trump would not do that, and it doesn't make any sense to me, but regardless, it is not as cataclysmic as it could be.

Central planning didn't work for Stalin or Mao, and it won't work for an entrepreneur either.

By speeding the transition to cleaner energy, we can improve the lives of billions of people, while also reducing the risks we face from a changing climate.

Nobody's going to elect me president of the United States.

Go walk the streets of Beijing. It's pretty hard to argue it isn't a modern city. Now, if you go outside [of Beijing], in the rural areas, that's true. But rural America, you can say the same thing, in Appalachia there's an awful lot of poverty and lack of education.

Millions of Americans have contributed to building a stronger Israel; I've been proud to be one of them. Last year, I went to Jerusalem to help dedicate in my father's name a new MDA medical facility which treats people of all faiths and all nationalities absolutely equally.

I think both of them [Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders] have [chances] because they are not the establishment, not for who they are.

Organizing around a common interest is a fundamental part of democracy. We should no more try to take away the right of individuals to collectively bargain than we should try to take away the right to a secret ballot.

Today, you're a piranha if you are seen having coffee with somebody from the other party in many cases.

Government by three men in a room has turned New York State into a national symbol of governmental dysfunction. Enough is enough!

The estate taxes, on balance, are good. They get people to give money to charity, and they prevent these family dynasties which keep other people from having opportunities. It may be good for a family, but for society it's probably not good. And I've always been in favor of having an estate tax.

You're going to see a million people here who have the courage to come and not let terrorists win, and that's exactly what we should all do.

Neither party has God on its side, a monopoly on good ideas, or a lock on any single fiscal, social, or moral philosophy.

The press really is not doing its job of holding their [the candidates'] feet to the fire. ... The tough questions are not what are you in favor of, but how are you going to get it through Congress?

I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom's annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have.

If you can't prove it's not true then a certain number of people will glom on and say it is true.

We need to inject some old-fashioned American values and common-sense, practical thinking into our energy policy.

I don't think there's much difference between the two parties. I think whatever their constituents at the moment want, that's what they believe. If their constituents changed, they would change overnight.

Leading from the front: It's what built America. But these days, the federal government isn't at the front - it's cowering in the back corner of the room, ducking responsibility and hoping no one notices.

If people are not smoking, they'll probably be drinking more.

You have to understand, we have better communications and better transportation, so people know what's available elsewhere and can get a message out, and you can move things. And you [can] say that the economy is more unpredictable.

The system [in U.S.] is designed for a two-party system. And those two parties have an interest in keeping third parties out. There's too much of the structure that works in the two-party way. They will keep the third party out.

Others may doubt us. They may criticize us. They may try to deny us what is rightfully ours. But they will fail. And I promise you, as long as I am mayor, I will never back away from fighting any opponent - or confronting any obstacle - that would prevent our people from achieving all of their dreams in Our New York.

We're [New York] the world's second home, the place where every religion is practiced and every culture is celebrated.

I know that many Irish-born New Yorkers are caught in the trap of our federal immigration policies. If we are going to continue to attract the best and the brightest - and Ireland has more than its fair share - we need to inject some common sense into our immigration laws, and I'm doing my best to make that case in Washington.

The Russian economy is way down because of the price of oil, and because the USSR was a big chunk of it.

There are lots of threats to you in the world. There's the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can't sit there and worry about everything. Get a life.

Nobody's going to go home for a year and come back. Nobody could ever enforce that. Nobody in their right mind would ever try to do it.

If it wasn't for O'Flanagan's Pub on Manhattan's Upper East Side, I don't know where I would have spent my Friday nights as a young man.

My personal view is, why don't you get out there and try to do something about the things that you don't like, create the jobs that we are lacking, rather than just yell and scream. But if you want to yell and scream, we'll make sure you can do it.

One's a dog-eat-dog world, and the other one's just the opposite.

You know, Russia today is, what, 200 million people? In land mass, it's probably 50 times the size [of Japan], in natural resources a hundred times the size! Russia's not doing all that badly. The public there - not everybody - but they have things that the West offered, [that] were only available in the West a long time ago.

If I remember, Russia, 20 or 30 years ago, you'd get shot trying to leave. Today, Russian tourists are all over the world. You have Russian oligarchs with big yachts all over the world.