Al-Waleed bin Talal's Quotes

I'm telling you, you can't compare Saudi Arabia to other countries.

It is very clear that the Republicans do not want to raise taxes.

King Abdullah is a reformer.

My wheels are running. My investments are local, regional and international.

Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward.

The lesson is that, No. 1, this management has to be at the highest class possible. No. 2, they have to have a succession plan.

The potential for Twitter is spectacular and great.

We're getting hurt, but I'm a long-term investor.

You cannot play with fire.

You know, Saudi Arabia has a lot of poverty also. Regardless about what you hear about the viceroy and people being rich, et cetera.

Actually, King Abdullah, under his supervision and guidance, has established a dialogue in Saudi Arabia whereby all the population, whether Shiite or Sunnis from north, south, west or east, they can get together and exchange their views.

The entire American media apparatus bought into the drug war - which is an enormously damaging and costly undertaking for this country - and there wasn't enough critical reporting about it and that's why it's gotten out of hand.

The entire economy, of course, is locked in a down cycle right now. Last time we weathered this was during another Bush presidency in '90. We were locked in it for a year and a half and everyone came out of it.

The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism.

When you're kept by a patron you don't have to duke it out in the media marketplace for dollars and for readers. In some ways that's a blessing because it takes a lot of pressure off you.

While I'm critical to the Bush presidency, it's been enormously beneficial for Salon because we're seen as kind of an aggressive watchdog on the Bush White House. Particularly since Florida, our readership hit a whole new level, and we held onto those readers.

You can crash on one set of rocks or the other set of rocks, and they crashed on the other set of rocks, which was probably being too little to be commercially viable.

A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything.

There are not that many new media brands you can say that about nowadays.

After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.

I came at age in the '60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.

It's like a cast of actors; you're all working together closely under pressure to produce something everyday. And when we put up an issue, it's like the curtains opening on a new play. I really like that daily sense of surprise.

Most magazines have become wallpaper, they're all the same, all the same celebrities. It's really an abysmal time in American journalism right now. But occasionally one story or two will pop out.

Even more important maybe, or equally more important at least, is they don't have to scrap for a living.

I don't think we would still be here if we hadn't gone public.

I got kicked out of high school, so I couldn't get into very many colleges.

I have no regrets about launching Salon. For the life of me, I can't imagine doing anything else.

I think we're really getting it right the last few months and hopefully we'll get better and better at it.

Journalism is not just a cause, it's also a wacky profession.

Most Sunday magazines, with the New York Times as an exception, are kind of sleepy, weekend service vehicles to move living room products.

My favorite thing is still journalism. I'm almost 50. This has been my life ever since I was in college.

They may be a little more high brow than we are.

Do I regret taking the company public? Yes and no. Yes, because it put us under enormous pressure for a young company to go public at that point in its history, something you never could have done in the old days.

I don't think Fox News or Rush Limbaugh need Clinton it turns out. I think there's a hunger out there for - whether it's on the left or right - a more lively and provocative type of political journalism. I think Salon and Fox on the other side have both benefited from that.

I have enormous respect for Steve Johnson, and as I've told him, Feed was one of the inspirations for Salon. They were up there before we were. And also for Joey and the Suck people.

I knew I wanted to be a journalist ever since I was a teenager. While it is interesting and gratifying to be on the business side and to see how that all works, the main reason I kept a business role here was to protect the editorial integrity of Salon.

I know that doesn't sound very radical and webby of me to say that but I think the New York Times is important. I also think there's an occasional piece that will pop out.

I think there is a difference between Slate and Salon. I think we both serve important functions on the Internet. As more and more Websites disappear, I'm thankful Slate is still around because it makes things less lonely.

I think we've broken story after story that the rest of the media refused to break even when they had the story because they were scared of the story, or they just didn't think it was appropriate.

On the other hand, we raised $25 million by going public. It's that money that we used to build this company, to build the circulation, to build a high profile and to hire staff that made Salon what it is today.

Other than that one year, Salon has been very cautious about the way it spends money. For instance, since last year, we've had virtually no marketing budget. It's just word of mouth. And our circulation continues to grow that way by breaking news stories.

People sort of take it for granted, but the more you see of the media world the more you appreciate a paper like the Times where its family continues to invest in editorial quality and I think it's the truly is the best paper in the world.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.

Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.

Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.

Paul Krugman is a danger to society!

People employed in financial institutions are rarely interesting and even more rarely likable.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.

The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.

The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.

The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.

The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.

The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.