Top 27 Madoff Quotes & Sayings

Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.

Bernie Madoff... was regulated up and down and every which way, and it didn't do any good - he ran away with everyone's money.

For those who unfairly lump Social Security in with Bernie Madoff, in all fairness, you should point out the difference. No one was ever legally required to pay money to Madoff.

I'm the Bernie Madoff of this spider.

I look at the newspapers, and I cannot believe most of the stories I read. Bernie Madoff, who actually screwed millions of people for billions of dollars, it's just unbelievable what he got away with and how long it took for him to be exposed. A guy like that should be hanged.

Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

I'm still trying to write. I wrote a play a few years ago, so I'm trying to start writing again. The play was called The Commons Of Pensacola. It was at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. It was kind of like a riff on Ruth Madoff.

Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country. They can compromise our security. They can undermine democracy. They can cause the deaths of those that defend us.

I'm as proud of my work in 'Madoff' as anything I've ever done. Richard Dreyfuss turned in a bravura performance. It went unnoticed.

I am profoundly concerned with the current treatment and status of Madoff fraud victims.

You have a guy like Bernie Madoff literally steal $80 billion, you know, AIG steal hundreds of billions, Goldman Sachs. Crime has changed so much, and to really do a movie with, like, drug dealers or drug smugglers is kind of almost quaint at this point.

There are tons of examples of U.K. and European mistakes. A classic one is pensions. That's obviously not an America-specific thing. The British and European economies are suffering under the weight of what is to come. The next great Ponzi scheme after Madoff is probably pensions.

You can't tell the story of the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by Bernie Madoff because there are thousands of stories. What you can do is to start inside, and that's the picture that you do, which becomes like a Greek tragedy in that regard - that whole collapse.

'Bernie versus Bernie,' for me, is these two extremes of capitalism. It's Bernie Sanders, the ultimate socialist, and Bernie Madoff, the ultimate capitalist.

If the American public were accurately polled, I suspect the results would find Bonnie & Clyde, Bill Clinton, Ponzi Scheme scamster Bernie Madoff, and the infamous Wily Coyoteto be believed to be more honest and trustworthy than Hillary Clinton.

Surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

Now, a lot of people didn't know him at all - it went through feeder funds, so they wouldn't even have known anything about Bernie Madoff. But everybody finds a justification for their behavior, and obviously, Bernie had a half dozen justifications in his own mind.

It has now become a status symbol among the rich to say that you got ripped off by Bernie Madoff, because everybody is losing money in the market, everybody is, but it makes you special and unique if you lost money because of Madoff. These people don't think it makes 'em look stupid. It continues to elevate their status, they think.

I got a call one morning from Oran Hesterman, who was the president of the Fair Food Foundation, saying that the Fair Food Foundation was shutting down effectively as of that day, because they'd been caught up in the Madoff scandal. It affected me because the fellowship that I had was actually funded in part by the Fair Food Foundation. That meant that my fellowship was pretty much null and void.

The federal government has made explicit and implicit promises to millions of people, but has put no money aside in order to keep those promises. Some of you may wonder where Bernie Madoff got the idea for his Ponzi scheme. Clearly he was studying federal entitlement policy.

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries.

I have ... spoken to the heads of various Wall Street equity derivatives trading desks and every single one of the senior managers I spoke with told me that Bernie Madoff was a fraud. Of course no one wants to take an undue career risk by sticking their head up ... The fewer people who know who wrote this report the better. I am worried about the personal safety of myself and my family.

My family survived losing money to Bernie Madoff incredibly well compared to others.

Madoff Securities is the world's largest Ponzi scheme.

Some people are in positions of power, and when incentives go haywire, we are all human and it's easy to make mistakes. I am not saying everybody is Bernie Madoff.

Madoff's scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare.

When my wife's sister passed away, Bernie Madoff came to the funeral. That was the type of individual that we all thought he was - a very caring individual.