Ken Auletta > Quotes

“Robert Lehman—who often told his partners, “I bet on people”—made Lehman the driving financial force behind RCA and the birth of television, TWA, Pan Am, Hertz, several Hollywood studios, and various department store and oil and rubber giants. Lehman Brothers was at the epicenter of those business forces that have shaped not just the American economy but the American culture as well. By 1967 the House of Lehman was responsible for $3.5 billion in underwriting. In volume, Lehman was among the top four investment banks.”
― Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman

“The first of the brothers to leave their home in search of fortune was Henry, then twenty-three and the oldest. Henry settled in this city of 4,000 citizens and 2,000 slaves. His two brothers soon followed, and in 1850 they established a trading and dry-goods business called Lehman Brothers.”
― Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman

“Marcus Goldman in 1869 launched what would become Goldman, Sachs & Company and pioneered the use of what is known today as commercial paper. In return for lending a merchant, say, $900, Goldman would receive a written promise from the merchant to pay back $1,000. That paper could then be traded like a security.”
― Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman

“By the mid-twenties, Philip’s son, Robert, began to assume principal responsibility for the partnership. He was a small, trim man, about five feet seven inches, with well-tanned, smooth skin and a dapper appearance. Unfailingly polite, Robert nevertheless knew what he wanted. First he wanted to move the firm. And in 1928 the headquarters of the partnership was transferred from a cramped space in the Farmers Loan & Trust Company building at 16 William Street to Lehman’s very own eleven-story triangular Italian Renaissance-style building at One William Street, in the heart of the financial district.* For the next fifty-two years this would be the home of Lehman Brothers.”
― Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman

“when Henry, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman decided to leave the family cattle business in Bavaria, they chose by instinct or luck to settle in Montgomery, Alabama, a hub of the cotton trade. The”
― Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman

“Paul Starr, whose authoritative history of the media, The Creation of the Media,”
― Ken Auletta, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Advertising Industry

“By suing his former lawyer, Baez’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, said Harvey had waived attorney-client privilege, allowing Tacopina on Baez’s behalf to denounce Harvey as 'a vile fiend' and a 'rapist.”
― Ken Auletta, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

“They tend to be entrepreneurial rather than managerial; they”
― Ken Auletta, The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger

“Harvey Weinstein took pride in not paying bills,” recounted Miramax’s former chief financial officer John Schmidt. “But when you stiff a filmmaker you are stiffing the very lifeblood of what your business is. The whole independent film business is based on championing the small guy.”
― Ken Auletta, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

“Orson Welles spoke of his creation, Charles Foster Kane, as being burdened by an “enraged conviction that no one exists but himself, his refusal to admit the existence of other people with whom one must compromise, whose feelings one must take into account”
― Ken Auletta, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

“The government, in effect, declared privacy privatized.”
― Ken Auletta, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business

“As in any insincere relationship, each man responded to shadows.”
― Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman

“Personal ambition and greed are essential to the success of a banking firm, but other qualities contribute to success, including teamwork, leadership, strong management, luck, a common tradition or culture.”
― Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman

“The state arbitrarily set the mortgage interest rate at 8.5 percent—below the prime rate of 9 or so percent—so banks could make more money out of state. The bottom line for financial institutions is profit.”
― Ken Auletta, The Streets Were Paved with Gold

“Media companies can be divided into two broad categories: the few who create waves, and the many who ride them - or drown.”
― Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

“Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.... Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”
― Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It