Quotes from John Brooks

expectation of an event creates a much deeper impression … than the event itself."—de

I don't think money makes much difference, as long as you have enough.

If you're not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?

Any board-room sitter with a taste for Wall Street lore has heard of the retort that J. P. Morgan the Elder is supposed to have made to a naïve acquaintance who had ventured to ask the great man what the market was going to do. "It will fluctuate," replied Morgan dryly.

Why should I want to have a lot of copies of this and that lying around? Nothing but clutter in the office, a temptation to prying eyes, and a waste of good paper.

we may see another speculative buildup followed by another crash, and so on until God makes people less greedy.

There is no possible protection from technology except by technology," he wrote. "When you create a new environment with one phase of technology,

To set high goals, to have almost unattainable aspirations, to imbue people with the belief that they can be achieved—these are as important as the balance sheet, perhaps more

doldrums, not only did prices continue to decline

11:14, twenty minutes; at 11:35, twenty-eight minutes; at 11:58,

they were "very clever in inventing reasons" for a sudden rise or fall in stock prices,

collecting 10 per cent on high incomes and lower rates on lower incomes constituted undue discrimination against wealth.

hard-working Krafve explains gamely that when a company

One of de la Vega's observations about the Amsterdam traders was that they were "very clever in inventing reasons" for a sudden rise or fall in stock prices,

He who sells what isn't his'n must buy it back or go to prison.

In the stock market, however, as de la Vega points out, "the news [as such] is often of little value;" in the short run, the mood of the investors is what counts.

It is foolish to think that you can withdraw from the Exchange after you have tasted the sweetness of the honey.

Whether the nostalgia of the Edsel boys for the Edsel runs to the humorous or to the tragic, it is a thought-provoking phenomenon. Maybe it means merely that they miss the limelight they first basked in and later squirmed in, or maybe it means that a time has come when—as in Elizabethan drama but seldom before in American business—failure can have a certain grandeur that success never knows.

American Telephone & Telegraph, the largest company of them all,

Every dog has one free bite. A dog cannot be presumed to be vicious until he has proved that he is by biting someone.

This preoccupation with the difficulty of getting a thought out of one head and into another is something the industrialists share with a substantial number of intellectuals and creative writers, more and more of whom seem inclined to regard communication, or the lack of it, as one of the greatest problems not just of industry but of humanity.

Confusion of Confusions," written by a plunger on the Amsterdam market named Joseph de la Vega;

The income-tax law in toto has virtually no defenders, even though most fair-minded students of the subject agree that its effect over the half century that it has been in force has been to bring about a huge and healthy redistribution of wealth.

THE game of Corner—for in its heyday it was a game, a high-stakes gambling game, pure and simple, embodying a good many of the characteristics of poker—was one phase of the endless Wall Street contest between bulls, who want the price of a stock to go up, and bears, who want it to go down.