Long or Short Capital

Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims?

Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.

-From the movie version of Graham Greene’s The Third Man

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience.

-Leo Tolstoy

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

The job of a Russian man is to plant:
His house in the ground (sic).
His seed in a woman.
His neighbour in jail.

-From Ruminations on Russia

That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.

-Abraham Lincoln

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

An Ode to Powerpoint:

While you were making your [Power­Point] slides, we would be killing you.
-Russian officer commenting to a US offier on who would have won if we had ever actually fought WWIII in Western Europe.

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

A loss never bothers me after I take it. I forget it overnight. But being wrong, not taking the loss, that is what does damage to the pocketbook and the soul.

-Jesse Livermore

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

-Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

This one goes out to all our hard-suffering CPA-studying accountant readers:

Accountancy was my life until I discovered Smirnoff.

-Vodka advertisement from 70’s

No one can earn a million dollars honestly.

-William Jennings Bryan

Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.

-Cicero

There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens.

-Leon Trotsky

The Greatest Happiness is to scatter your enemy and drive him before you. To see his cities reduced to ashes. To see those who love him shrouded and in tears. And to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters.

-Genghis Khan

No matter how good our kung-fu is, it will never defeat guns.

-Iron Robe Yim

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

-George Washington