My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.
I am concerned about the erraticness of the dollar. The dollar is up, the dollar is down. We print a lot of dollars. The dollar gets devalued. That is really the concern. If people think the gold price up and down is a reflection of something wrong with gold, no - I say it is something wrong with the dollar.
And yet, if we don't, first and foremost, act responsibly with the national tax dollars that we have, we can't properly address those regional priorities that we would like to.
It's going to cost trillions of dollars to rework the energy sources all over the world. Were going to have to move away from fossil fuels.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
In the old days, money controlled politics. Today, information controls politics. So I think with the advent of the Internet, the power of wealth has been diminished. Look up all the people you know who spent millions and millions of dollars and fell short.
Having billions of dollars immediately available to plug budget holes without raising taxes is very appealing. And to the delight of Wall Street investors, state and local governments often fail to ask the important questions or consider the long-term impact.
Just because there are celebrities in a movie, it doesn't mean anything. I don't think The Ant Bully did all that well the first week at the box office. Compare the movies that have a lot of celebrities with the Jimmy Neutron movie, which had no celebrity voices and grossed almost one hundred million dollars.
I came into the game when I broke into the major leagues, the minimum salary was seven thousand dollars, and I'd have to go home in the wintertime and get a job.
From day one, my focus as a new-breed appropriator was to look for areas where we could save taxpayer dollars.
There is no question that we are in a period in which we are going to have to use those sources to fund about 35 million dollars a year that used to be paid for by the federal government.
They don't pay you a million dollars for two-hand chest passes.
Proactive giving is what you do when you've found your passion. It expresses your values, interests and concerns. It engages not just your dollars, but also your mind, time, skills and networks - the philanthropic equivalent of leaning in, rather than leaning back. Most importantly, proactive giving is something you want to do.
The first thing you need to run for President is a budget of around $20 million dollars a day.
If people are going to give, they're going to give. And it doesn't matter if you give a dollar or five dollars or a hundred dollars or a million dollars; it's all according to your ability.
I had a couple of million dollars' worth of... stock once. And now it's not worth much more than wallpaper. I guess I just wasn't born to be rich.
I would rather have a million friends than a million dollars.
I spent money, and I kept thinking, 'I get one more movie and I'll wipe these bills out,' but that movie never came. That black pride, I said, 'Man, I'm going to hang in there, I'm going to pay these bills.' So you owe a million dollars. 'I can pay that.' OK, fines, fees, now you owe two and a half million. 'But I didn't do nothin'!'
I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week.
We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have given up on the Pentagon's corrupt use of our tax dollars.
We're investing billions of dollars in housing, in home care on the medical side. We're investing billions of dollars in public transit that is not just creating good jobs now but is going to help people get to and from their good jobs in more reliable ways.
One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.
White artists have made millions of dollars off music they stole from black artists. I don't blame all the white artists. I'm a huge Stevie Ray Vaughn fan, and he was always very gracious about where he learned his music. But a lot of the time, you'd think the white guys thought it up. Hey, hasn't anyone heard of Muddy Waters?
It's a little hard not to be an elitist when you're making millions of dollars a year.
The bailout of Fannie Mae is completely off the books. It's going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet nobody is placing this in any type of column in accounting for federal debt.
If you're Burberry or Gucci, you're not going to run a banner ad. To get brand ad dollars to move to digital, you need to create a beautiful experience.
Word of mouth is way more important than millions of dollars spent marketing.
I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers, or I would have to give up five dollars.
If Wal-Mart invests a billion dollars and others invest $100 million, Wal-Mart is going to grow more.
Prioritizing spending and maximizing the effectiveness of taxpayer dollars is absolutely essential. We must draw the line, realigning programs when necessary and also eliminating failed programs.
There are billions of dollars spent every year on traditional media. The majority of people are spending more time every day on the Internet, especially on mobile. You're starting to see a shift of that spend go to mobile, especially to things like 'Instagram'.
I have a lot of stands on a lot of political issues. I'm very big on campaign finance reform. I still think most Americans aren't aware of how the dumping of big corporate dollars and private donor dollars has totally corrupted the political system and taken it away from them.
Even if you're Bill Gates, you've got problems. I'm sure he would probably easily give a few billion dollars to get rid of all the problems that he has.
One lesson I got from Gandhi, 'Be the change you want to see,' haunts me. I just feel like I can't keep stomping around pointing the finger at BP when I am supporting the oil industry with my very own dollars and actions by buying their products, helping to pay their mortgage - plastic is from oil... polyester, shower curtains.
Storytelling is the game. It's what we all do. It's why Nike is Nike, it's why Apple is Apple, it's why Walt Disney built Disney World and it's why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.
Often, what makes my job so exciting is designing for the mother whose dream has been to wear one of my hats at her child's wedding. I feel as responsible for making her feel like a million dollars as I do for somebody in the public eye.
