Kenneth Langone

I don\'t know whether other people should or shouldn\'t pay taxes. I know I can, and I am willing, to pay more taxes. I know I should not get Social Security. I don\'t need it. Kenneth Langone

Contrary to what you might assume, I didn\'t start with any advantages and neither did most of the successful people I know. I am the grandson of immigrants who came to this country seeking basic economic and personal liberty.

When a New York attorney general brings a lawsuit against a prominent business person, there are two things you can count on out of that office - lots of political bluster and little accountability.

I think I should pay more taxes... but everything they take from me should go to reduce the debt.

Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on - that\'s how much he revered the presidency.

Genes don\'t mean necessarily that you have got a certain strand of gene that makes you particularly acceptable as a public official.

We ought to look at Social Security. We ought to ask ourselves the question, is there inherently something wrong with Social Security that a man like me is eligible for Social Security? There\'s something wrong with the system.

I\'m a stockholder. I own a lot of stocks.

You want to close the income inequality gap in part? Give us better educated kids out of high school. Give us kids that can challenge and succeed in the challenge with technology. You give us those kinds of kids, and watch the needle move.

The essence of business to me is great people run great companies. Mediocre people don\'t do a very good job.

My connection was we never want to put ourselves in a position as a nation where we pit group against group.

People making $1 million a year are not going to do anything different if they pay more taxes.

When then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued me in 2003 over my stewardship as a director of the New York Stock Exchange, the NYSE\'s legal expenses were more than $100 million, which made it perhaps the priciest litigation in the state\'s history.

As a little boy, my first job was delivering newspapers, and then I had a variety of different jobs. I worked in a butcher shop. I worked in a supermarket. I worked in construction. I dug ditches on the Long Island Expressway in 1954, 1955, 1956.

I have been in Wall Street all of my life. I love it. It has been good to me. I know many wonderful, decent, honorable, ethical, hard-working people that were in Wall Street with me.

A little more than 30 years ago, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Pat Farrah and I got together and founded The Home Depot.

We need to understand as a nation that you can\'t forever expect somebody out there, whether it\'s China or somebody in England, to say, \'I will always take America\'s debt no matter what.\'

Why do we have U.S. attorneys? Because we need a mechanism to make sure people obey the laws that we pass, for societal reasons.

I have, never, ever once, ever gotten anything from any politician I\'ve ever helped. Not one thing.

The economy is a collection of emotions.

We took the position we wanted our people to be better than minimum wage, so we\'re going to pay better than minimum wage, and we still do that.

We had 90 percent taxes before in America. All right? Didn\'t work.

Rich people in one country don\'t act the same as rich people in another country.

I consider myself a significant supporter of any candidate I work for, and I am certainly generous, I think, with my own funds.

You can have a phenomenal technology with bad people; you\'re not gonna have much success. You can have mediocre technology with great people; they\'ll figure out a way to make a buck.

I have invested in companies. I have worked in companies. We have built companies; we have created jobs.

The wealth that was created by my investments wasn\'t put into a giant swimming pool as so many elected demagogues seem to imagine. Instead it benefitted our employees, their families and our community at large.

I don\'t really know and I don\'t care what I\'m worth.

I should not get Social Security. I think it\'s a travesty for a man of my success and of my means to get anything from the federal government.

You only have to worry about going to jail if you break the law. That\'s pretty simple.