Ability is all right but if it is not backed up by honesty and public confidence you will never be a successful person. The best a man can do is to arrive at the top in his chosen profession. I have always maintained that one profession is deserving of as much honor as another provided it is honorable.

If a bank fails in China, they behead the men at the top of it that was responsible... If we beheaded all of ours that were responsible for bank failures, we wouldn't have enough people left to bury the heads.

An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.

We never will have any prosperity that is free from speculation till we pass a law that every time a broker or person sells something, he has got to have it sitting there in a bucket, or a bag, or a jug, or a cage, or a rat trap, or something, depending on what it is he is selling. We are continually buying something that we never get from a man that never had it.

But we can't alibi all our ills by just knocking the old banker. First he loaned the money, then the people all at once wanted it back, and he didn't have it. Now he's got it again, and is afraid to loan it, so the poor devil don't know what to do.

You have a wonderful organization. I understand you have ten thousand here. And if you count the ones in the various federal prisons, it brings your total membership up to around thirty thousand.

The bankers just got a good cussing by everybody for loaning too much money. Well, they got some awful nice buildings. So when a banker fails, he fails in splendor.

I guess there is no two races of people in worse repute with everybody than the international bankers, and the folks that put all those pins in new shirts.

When you are satisfied, you are successful. For that's all there is to success is satisfaction.