67 Quotes by Bill Browder

Russian stories never have happy endings.

The moral is simple: when it comes to money, Russians will gladly—gleefully, even—sacrifice their own success to screw their neighbor.

I arrived in the late afternoon at Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport. I stared out of my window as the plane taxied to the terminal and was astonished to see the burned-out carcass of an Aeroflot passenger plane lying on the side of the runway. I had no idea how it had gotten there. Apparently it was too much of a bother for the airport authorities to have it moved. Welcome to Russia.

My heart sank. It’s hard to describe how small $50,000 is to an investment banker. Linda Evangelista, a supermodel from the 1980s and 1990s, once famously declared, “I don’t get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day.” For an investment banker, that number is more like $1 million. But here I was having earned nothing for Salomon, and $50,000 was that much more than zero, so I agreed.

The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.

If I’m killed, you will know who did it. When my enemies read this book, they will know that you know.

We had a big debate internally about what to do next. We were getting nowhere with traditional advocacy tools and running out of ideas. But then our twenty-four-year-old secretary popped her head into my office and said, ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Have you guys ever thought of doing a YouTube video?’ I.

The imagination is a horrible thing when it’s preoccupied with exactly how someone might try to kill you.

While Putin expected a bad reaction from the United States, he had no idea what kind of hornet’s nest he’d stirred up in his own country. One can criticize Russians for many things, but their love of children isn’t one of them. Russia is one of the only countries in the world where you can take a screaming child into a fancy restaurant and no one will give you a second look. Russians simply adore children.