Quotes from Lloyd Blankfein

Ambition is your inner voice that tells you you can and should strive to go beyond your circumstances or station in life.

Every time I get accustomed to low volatility, like we were towards the end of the Greenspan era, and we think we have all the levers under the control... something erupts to remind us that the idea that anybody is in control of everything is hubris.

I got into Goldman really by acquisition because I had gone - I grew up in east New York in the Linden Projects - I did go to fancy schools, but my resume wasn't up to a Wall Street set of resumes. I went to college. I went to law school and practiced for a while.

You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career... So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised.

America's corporations learned long ago that equality is just good business and is the right thing to do.

Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It's a virtuous cycle.

I am one with the popular culture.

The list of things that are conventional today that I use every day that I thought would never make it is a very long list.

I'm the chocolate chip cookie king of the world.

I'd say if you wanted to forestall bad events, the best thing to do is anticipate them and try to correct them before they get close.

It's very hard to go out and make big investments to take advantage of the shale energy if we don't know if it's always going to be there, what price it's going to be there, whether the country's going to allow it to be exported, or whether it's going to go and affect subsidized U.S. manufacturing.

I always thought that a prep school was what some people went to after high school to prepare themselves for college.

Ambition is your inner voice that tells you, you can, and should, strive to go beyond your circumstances or situation in life.

To the extent I bloomed, I'm a late bloomer.

My - I grew up in - I grew up in public housing. My dad, for most of my life, worked for the post office, which was a terrific job to get because you couldn't lose your job.

The U.S. is not pure capitalism. In fact, there's no place for pure capitalism, unregulated capitalism. We have a regulated system.

If you do something really well, the entire world beats a path to your door. The number three, number five, number 400 player gets nothing. It's almost a winner take all.

My favourite day is like when it's raining, and I can just lie on the couch.

I always had a lot of confidence in my ability to gauge a situation and people and try to understand them and what they were saying and what their context was.

No one at Goldman Sachs gets paid out of his or her own P&L. It matters how your business is doing, but it matters more how the firm as a whole is doing.

If you had asked me, did I have everything nailed down and wired about what I wanted to do, and was I following some real plan? No. In fact, by the time I was in my mid-20s or even late-20s, and I was still in the law firm, I really was starting to get a little nervous that I didn't know what I was going to do.

With interest rates rising, gold doesn't pay an interest rate, but every other currency - it becomes not only less important to hold gold as an alternative, but more expensive to hold it as an insurance policy and so that will be a burden on the price of gold.

You don't know how you'll react to things until you live through them.

Change is often the agent of progress in ways we can't always readily see in the early days.