If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.

If we can just take a few companies, and use those as models, as examples, to show the rest of corporate America how they can become more competitive, that's what I'd like to do and that's what I hope to do.

I want people who will stand up to me. People who are not afraid to say exactly what's on their minds, even though that's probably not what I want to hear. That's what I want.

If you have something at risk, you think differently.

I was an economics major in college, and every summer after school, I would drive my car from California, from Claremont men's college at the time, to New York. And I worked on Wall Street.

As I said there is nothing wrong with failing. Pick yourself up and try it again. You never are going to know how good you really are until you go out and face failure.

The trouble, in my opinion, with corporate America today, is that everything is thought of in quarters.

One, I love the creativity. I love the ability to create a capital structure that is appropriate for a company, no matter what field it happens to be in.

I love the ability to work with very good managers, and to provide the right incentives for them, and truly become a partner with that management, and make that management take a long view.

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.

I thought at the time that I wanted to go into institutional sales, selling stocks and bonds to institutions. In those days, which was the 1960s, the institutional salesman was making about $100,000 a year. I thought that was just an enormous amount of money.

If you build that foundation, both the moral and the ethical foundation, as well as the business foundation, and the experience foundation, then the building won't crumble.

I've been in a hurry all my life. I've been in a hurry to succeed, and in a hurry to prove myself.

So I picked a field where I had a little exposure. Where I thought I could have an enormous challenge, and have a chance to really do some good, to be a pioneer in an area, and not just be like everyone else.

It's one of the most important things at the end of the day, being able to say no to an investment.

I always like to refer managers in corporate America as the renters of the corporate assets, not the owners.

But once you buy a company, you are married. You are married to that company.

You only have one thing to sell in life, and that's yourself.

Look, don't congratulate us when we buy a company, congratulate us when we sell it. Because any fool can overpay and buy a company, as long as money will last to buy it.

I have, in my partner George Roberts, a person who is the most wonderful man in the world to me. He's like a brother to me. Creating with him, being side by side with him, in whatever we try to do, is a real pleasure to me.

It's not just buying the company. Sure, we picked the right companies, and we picked the right management and, most importantly, we've given them the right incentive to perform.

Giving back is something that comes from the heart to me. It's not that I do it because it's the right thing: I do it because I want do it.

In the '70s and '80s, what private equity did is it changed corporate America. It started holding companies accountable, and for the first time managers started thinking like owners.

It used to be that you would go in to see a CEO, and you would ask them, 'Is your company for sale?' and if they said 'No, we have no interest in selling,' that was sort of the end of the conversation.

Quite frankly, the financial community has to improve its image. The financial community has to be much more transparent than it is.

A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them.

Giving back is something that comes from the heart to me. Its not that I do it because its the right thing I do it because I want do it.

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it.

There are actually very few US politicians who have integrity and vision.

We Bosniaks would for sure fight for integrity of Bosnia.

It's hard to exaggerate the importance of preserving the financial integrity of Social Security.

I am most proud of my integrity and least proud of my cynicism.

I care about being able to play. If you're playing with integrity in the music, then that's what matters. But it wasn't that great for me because it was kinda like going back into the old times without the guy.

Subtlety may deceive you; integrity never will.

They will sustain the constitution and laws and institutions of the United States, and be the champions of liberty and of that constitution when its integrity shall be threatened.

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

It was a department where you had honesty and integrity stamped right on you when you came into the Los Angeles Police Department. If you violated that, or if you were a dishonest cop, you were terrible. We got rid of you as quickly as possible.

The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.

The same characters that keep reappearing, bigger than life, find their own integrity in doing what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths.

For better or worse, I've always tried to march to my own drum and tell it like it is, while preserving some integrity and style. God, I'm fabulous!

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

Integrity is integrity. I don't push it to the side because I'm talking to Julia Roberts.

A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.

There is an integrity to INXS, in the music, that makes it worthwhile.

Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect.

If you find yourself in a movie that you have questions about, it's not a compromise to your integrity.

Actors say they do their own stunts for the integrity of the film but I did them because they looked like a lot of fun.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

He who closes his ears to the views of others shows little confidence in the integrity of his own views.