Walter Wriston famous quotes

03-26-2025

The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.
-- Walter Wriston

#Business #Blow #Organization
Countries don't go out of business....The infrastructure doesn't go away, the productivity of the people doesn't go away, the natural resources donâ€™t go away. And so their assets always exceed their liabilities, which is the technical reason for bankruptcy. And that's very different from a company.
-- Walter Wriston

#Country #People #Going Away
Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.
-- Walter Wriston

#Important #Information
All of life is the management of risk, not its elimination.
-- Walter Wriston

#Risk #Management #Life Is
Human capital will go where it is wanted, and it will stay where it is well treated. It cannot be driven; it can only be attracted.
-- Walter Wriston

#Driven #Wanted #Wells
The Doomsayers have always had their uses, since they trigger the coping mechanism that often prevents the events they forecast.
-- Walter Wriston

#Use #Events #Coping
Banking is a branch of the information business.
-- Walter Wriston

#Information #Banking #Branches
It is a maxim of cryptology that what one man can devise, another can unravel. This principle keeps armies of tax lawyers and accountants employed, but adds nothing to our national productivity.
-- Walter Wriston

#Army #Men #Add
Rising prices or wages do not cause inflation; they only report it. They represent an essential form of economic speech, sincemoney isjust another form of information.
-- Walter Wriston

#Wages #Rising #Speech
Every line in the government's budget has its own constituency.
-- Walter Wriston

#Government #Lines
When you retire you go from Who's Who to Who's That?
-- Walter Wriston

#Aging #Retiring
A country does not go bankrupt.
-- Walter Wriston

#Country #Doe #Investing
If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.
-- Walter Wriston

#Law #Government #Investing
Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is.
-- Walter Wriston

#Failure #Crime #Learning From Failure
There'll be a growing disparity between economics and politics. An economy that grows so rapidly is intractably global. On the other hand, the current political system is intractably national. So there is a growing dichotomy between a global economy and locally based politics.
-- Walter Wriston

#Hands #Political #Growing
All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.
-- Walter Wriston

#Law #Judging #Liberty
The information revolution has changed people's perception of wealth. We originally said that land was wealth. Then we thought it was industrial production. Now we realize it's intellectual capital. The market is showing us that intellectual capital is far more important that money. This is a major change in the way the world works. the same thing that happened to the farmers during the Industrial Revolution is now happening to people in industry as we move into the information age.
-- Walter Wriston

#Moving #Land #People
A truly global economy, as opposed to the multinational economy of the recent past, will require concessions of national power ... that seemed impossible a few years ago and which even now we can but partly imagine,
-- Walter Wriston

#Past #Years #Impossible
Information about money is more important than money itself.
-- Walter Wriston

#Important #Information
Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well treated.
-- Walter Wriston

#Welcome #Wells #Treated
Capital will always go where itâ€™s welcome and stay where itâ€™s well treated. Capital is not just money. Itâ€™s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where theyâ€™re welcome and stay where they are well treated.
-- Walter Wriston

#Ideas #Welcome #Talent
I walk into all these organizations, and I'm always puzzled when I realize that people still want to be there. Most people really want to love their organizations. We need that level of commitment ... Yet organizations have done very little to deserve that kind of staying-power.
-- Walter Wriston

#Loyalty #Commitment #Organization

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