Quotes About Dollars

How is it possible that a process can be democratic when it comes by way of money? If there is money then it can be elected a senator, it can be elected a representative. Do you know how much it cost to be elected president of the United States? The amount has reached, billions of dollars, 2 billion, 3 billion, 4 billion dollars, that's how much a presidential campaign costs. How much does a senatorial campaign cost? It costs 80 to 90 million dollars; or the campaign of a representative, 40 to 50 million. Is that really a democracy?

The problem is that the way [President] Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents - number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome - so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back. [That's] $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic.

This sounds crazy, I know, but you can make a billion dollars - very few people do - but you can make a billion dollars on a product. It can be "Lion King," it can be "Simpsons," it can be "Family Guy," who knows what it is. Or you can make zero. But you can't make a billion dollars if you don't own it.

To those advocates of independent paper moneys who also champion the free market, I would address this simple question: "Why don't you advocate the unlimited freedom of each individual to manufacture dollars?" If dollars are really and properly things-in-themselves, why not let everyone manufacture them as they manufacture wheat and baby food?

I think, it was like 30 million dollars the Libertarians talk about that it cost them to get on the ballot. We don't have 30 million dollars. We're a people powered campaign.

I remember my first check that I got for a thousand dollars, and where I grew up, I never thought I'd have a thousand dollars at one time.

In an era that's run on free agency, everybody's going where the dollars are. They go after the dollars and they forget that the game will always come down to brotherhood.

There is one thing of which I can assure you. If good performance of the fund is even a minor objective, any portfolio encompassing one hundred stocks (whether the manager is handling one thousand dollars or one billion dollars) is not being operated logically. The addition of the one hundredth stock simply can't reduce the potential variance in portfolio performance sufficiently to compensate for the negative effect its inclusion has on the overall portfolio expectation.

Whether I make two dollars or no dollars, it's better than losing. I've got enough people playing the games at the casino that I don't lose any money. So it's good for me, and it's fun.

You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.

I'm kidding about having only a few dollars. I might have a few dollars more.

I just wanted to make a million dollars. But I couldn't sing and I couldn't play ball, so I said to my mother, 'How am I going to make a million dollars?' And she said to me, 'Son, if you believe you can do it, you will.'

I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there, it's so petty.

You know how many movies it took Tom Cruise before he was making 5, 6 million dollars? It probably took a billion dollars in box office.

The Arab League tells us to go in and take out Qaddafi. We've spent billions of dollars already with respect to the Arab League. Billions of dollars, because they told us to do it. Why aren't they paying for it? They don't like Qaddafi, Qaddafi's been a terrible thorn in their side.

My method is basically the same as Masters and Johnson, only they charge thousands of dollars and it's called therapy. I charge fifty dollars and it's called prostitution.

The United States found dozens of billions of dollars for military action in Iraq, so it should certainly be able to find a few billions of dollars to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. I'll assume that since the most powerful nation - the United States - has promised to pay for much of this, then its word will be kept. If it isn't, I don't think we can have a true partnership.

Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said "x number of dollars" three times.

If it's a choice between spending twenty five dollars for tickets to a movie and almost that much again for drinks and popcorn, it's understandable that people are opting to buy a movie on DVD for fifteen dollars, even if it's no-frills.

A father and two sons run Adelphia. It's a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people - three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do, start their own space program? 'Let's send the monkey to Mars, Dad!'

Once I got to know what's been happening historically, it's pretty impossible to un-know it. Like right now, there's the outbreak of cholera in Haiti, and people see that as a news headline, but I know there's half a billion dollars of aid that one senator is putting a hold on, that the Red Cross has raised half a billion dollars but has only spent $200 million.

The Obama administration asked General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner to step down, and he agreed. This is good news for Obama; the last time he tried to get someone to quit, it took months -- and even then, he had to promise her a job as secretary of state. ... According to the government, Rick Wagoner was forced to resign because of poor performance. That's embarrassing -- run an organization that loses billions of dollars and then get fired by a guy who heads up an organization that loses trillions of dollars.

“If I had been on 'Bowling for Dollars,' I'd wind up owing them money.”

Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests.

The stuff that works best is driven by passion rather than dollars.

In the Iowa senate, I helped pass the largest tax cut in state history - returning over four billion dollars in savings and putting more money back in the pockets of hard-working Iowa families.

You'd really spend about a hundred dollars for fake testicles for your cat? I'm not sure I'd spend that for fake testicles for myself.

There is no law that says a man who earned a hundred million dollars in his first half-dozen years on the job has to be a decent human being, but Mike Eisner is that and more.

Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.

If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.

I think it's a real debate how big NATO should be and whether or not it's more provocative than good. Whenever there's a war fought, our soldiers fight it and our dollars pay for it. And, really, our decisions need to be about our national security.

If ignorance goes to forty dollars a barrel, I want drilling rights to George Bush's head.

I don't see how we can allow public dollars to fund programs where spite and hate is the core of the message.

Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

You are taken sick; you send for a physician; he comes in, stays ten minutes, prescribes for you a healing medicine, and charges you three or four dollars. You call this 'extortionate' - forgetting the medical books he must have waded through, the revolting dissections he must have witnessed and participated in, and the medical lectures he must have digested, to have enabled him to pronounce on your case so summarily and satisfactorily.

I've never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about. When they say that we're buying too much from overseas, that we're sending too many dollars overseas to get all these goods and services they got, they're saying that the American dollar is too strong and that is hurting our economy. And the result of this will be that the American dollar will get too weak, and that will hurt our economy.

When this president was sworn into office, he was handed a deficit of over a trillion dollars. Republicans were in control of Congress for much of the time that President George W. Bush was in office, and they didn't do a great job of controlling spending.

Over half a billion dollars a day is being spent by FEMA.

I'm so Optimistic I'll take my last 2 dollars and buy a Money Belt.

No. It is not acceptable that the 6 largest financial institutions in this country have assets of almost 10 trillion dollars, and issue half of the mortgages and two-thirds of the credit cards. That is too much wealth and power in the hands of a few. If Teddy Roosevelt were alive today he'd tell us to 'break them up.' And he'd be right. These huge banks must be broken up.

Here in the Great Lakes region, a fourth year in a row of declining water levels has caused millions of dollars in losses for shipping companies, marinas and other businesses and prompted further restrictions on future water withdrawals for expanding suburbs. "A lot of people just can't believe that we may be running out of water, living this close to the Great Lakes," said Sarah Nerenberg, a water engineer with the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, which conducted the study on shortages.

What's important to remember politically about this, is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an Exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits. But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying to your citizens, you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these Exchanges, and that they’ll do it. But you know, once again, the politics can get ugly around this.

I like the idea of having more of a fun convention during the election campaign, if it's showbiz, if it's entertainment, whatever the case may be. I like that idea, but with every suggestion comes millions of dollars in money. So, the suggestions are great, but there has to be, you know, a pretty big influx of cash to do something like that.

After 9/11, the American Red Cross received more than half a billion dollars in donations to help the victims of the terrorist attacks. The families of the victims were already well-provided for by various government funds, so Red Cross simply drew a line across lower Manhattan and offered everyone there financial assistance, whether they needed it or not.

When you finish college, you don’t suddenly have thousands of dollars a year to spend elsewhere - in fact, you have to find a way to pay back your loans.

I wasn't that interested in the dollars-and-cents part of business. My interest in starting Mary Kay Inc. was to offer women opportunities that didn't exist anywhere else.

At a time when going to college has never been more important, it's never been more expensive, and our nation's families haven't been in this kind of financial duress since the great depression. And so what we have is just sort of a miraculous opportunity simply by stopping the subsidy to banks when we already have the risk of loans. We can plow those savings into our students. And we can make college dramatically more affordable, tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce - yes, announce - that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by... liberals.