Norman Braman Quotes

My dad was a terrible businessman.

In 1958, my father invested everything he had in a business venture and became the largest automobile dealership in Chicago for Ford's new Edsel line. But Edsel sales plummeted and my father fell into bankruptcy. I watched him struggle; working long hours to protect us from poverty.

When I came to DreamWorks, I was in bad trouble. They were in bad trouble. They were millions of dollars in the hole and a few days from closing their doors. I was on my last leg.

Enron Field in Houston, the Trans World Dome in St. Louis and PSINet Stadium in Baltimore are just three of the modern-day coliseums named for companies that have found new homes in bankruptcy court.

As president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, I have seen private equity firms plunder company after company, taking rich fees for themselves and cutting costs until there's nothing left to cut. Time and again I've seen their reckless behavior drive companies to declare bankruptcy.

In America you can be Donald Trump, have a business go wrong, and file for Chapter 11. You can move on, and no one complains. When his casinos were in Chapter 11, he was still on TV telling people how to get rich. I had to persevere for years with easyInternet because I couldn't afford to hurt the brand.

We sunk everything into it. It came close to going under several times.

I did go bankrupt because everybody copied me - every single industry. But genuinely, it doesn't matter. I swear I don't care.

You cannot have companies where many of the largest ones lose money indefinitely without someone finally waving the white flag, and IBM is the most recent example of that.

I came along at a time when the industry was eating its young.

Being a starving company isn't fun for anyone. Most that go away need to go away... but certainly not all.

We have spent years robbing Peter to pay Paul until now Paul is also broke.

We see - every week or two, we see another story of a small business that went out of business because Donald Trump.

The American television industry is a Darwinian environment where success is usually measured in inches, not yards. That is, for most TV media, audiences have gotten so small that one measures 'victories' in tenths of a point - as in, a 2.2 percent share is a great leap over a 2.1 percent share.

Trump bankrupted six companies but succeeded on the biggest of stages. He is the champion of failures.

Gox is the worst-run business in the history of the world.

On one level, going bust didn't bother me. It was the 80s, and there wasn't the stigma about bankruptcy that you might think. My mates weren't bothered. My dad was in business.. he knew that it happened, too. He loaned me the money to bail me out, and I got a loan from the bank to pay him back.

You can't count a man out because one record went different direction. You gotta count the things that scored, not the misses.

I don't believe in doing collections anymore.

Basically, success the way we've defined it is no longer sustainable. It's no longer sustainable for human beings or for societies.

The company later went broke, and of course all blame was directed at the lawyers. Not once did I hear any talk that maybe a trace of mismanagement could in any way have contributed to the bankruptcy.

If any of my competitors were drowning, I'd stick a hose in their mouth and turn on the water. It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way - of survival of the fittest.

My father died and left me his blessing and his business. His blessing brought no money into my pocket, and as to his business, it soon deserted me, for I was busy writing poetry, and could not attend to law, and my clients, though they had great respect for my talents, had no faith in a poetical attorney.

Trump Entertainment Resorts declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Or as Donald Trump describes Chapter 11, "Back-to-back number ones!"

Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.