Oliver Stone Quotes
There is nothing inherently wrong with greed as a human motivator - greed motivating evolution. But there's a huge disconnect between the classes. It is very demoralizing to work for someone who makes a billion dollars a year while you make just barely enough to make it.
Stone, Oliver. Interview. The New York Times, Sept. 2010.
Abrams originated this famous phrase which many have been used subsequently for various “socialized” government benefits that were available to the rich but not the poor. He was referring to the fact that at the time, the government provided housing assistance to the rich by having federally insured mortgages and granting tax deductions for the interest in home mortgages, but there was no assistance to the poor who could only afford to rent and had no tax deductions nor was there any federal public housing assistance. During the Great Recession the phrase was often used when the government gave bail out money to General Motors and the largest banks who were close to bankruptcy, but the landscaping gardener or the hot dog vendor whose business was falling because of the recession were told that is the capitalist system—there are some winners and some losers. The government officials who advocated the bailout did not disagree about the fairness and appropriateness of the Abrams phrase but if they had not bailed the banks out, the entire economic system of the country would probably have collapsed and the ensuing depression would hurt the average worker and the poor even more. Related to the recent “too big to fail” concept.
The crisis of inequality of income and wealth has occurred seven times in American history.
William Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Stone won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay as writer of Midnight Express (1978), and wrote the gangster movie remake Scarface (1983). Stone achieved prominence as writer and director of the war drama Platoon (1986), which won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. Platoon was the first in a trilogy of films based on the Vietnam War, in which Stone served as an infantry soldier. He continued the series with Born on the Fourth of July (1989)—for which Stone won his second Best Director Oscar—and Heaven & Earth (1993). Stone's other works include the Salvadoran Civil War-based drama Salvador (1986); the financial drama Wall Street (1987) and its sequel Money Never Sleeps (2010); the Jim Morrison biographical film The Doors (1991); the satirical black comedy crime film Natural Born Killers (1994); a trilogy of films based on the American Presidency: JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), and W. (2008); and Snowden (2016).
