Quotes from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

Bryan Burrough ·  592 pages

Rating: (22.5K votes)


“Everyone in the room knew about leveraged buyouts, often called LBOs. In an LBO, a small group of senior executives, usually working with a Wall Street partner, proposes to buy its company from public shareholders, using massive amounts of borrowed money. Critics of this procedure called it stealing the company from its owners and fretted that the growing mountain of corporate debt was hindering America’s ability to compete abroad. Everyone knew LBOs meant deep cuts in research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrificed to pay off debt. Proponents insisted that companies forced to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: The executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich.”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


“It is important to remember that, as Ken Auletta wrote in his definitive Greed and Glory on Wall Street, “no reporter can with 100 percent accuracy re-create events that occurred some time before. Memories play tricks on participants, the more so when the outcome has become clear. A reporter tries to guard against inaccuracies by checking with a variety of sources, but it is useful for a reader—and an author—to be humbled by this journalistic limitation.”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


“He who’s not busy being born is busy dying.” Tony”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


“Planning, gentlemen, is ‘What are you going to do next year that’s different from what you did this year?’” he told them. “All I want is five items.”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


“Recognize that ultimate success comes from opportunistic, bold moves which, by definition, cannot be planned.”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco



“Through all the machismo, through all the greed, through all the discussion of shareholder values, it all came down to this: John Gutfreund and Tom Strauss were prepared to scrap the largest takeover of all time because their firm’s name would go on the right side, not the left side, of a tombstone advertisement buried among the stock tables at the back of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


“turn over the reins to the board of directors.”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


“The minute you establish an organization, it starts to decay.”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


“changes in the story were the result of normal editing.”
― Bryan Burrough, quote from Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


About the author

Bryan Burrough
Born date August 13, 1961
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Evening prayer

I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.

Like steaming dung within an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.

And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams
In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn
To satisfy a need I can't ignore,

And like the Lord of Hyssop and of Myrrh
I piss into the skies, a soaring stream
That consecrates a patch of flowering fern.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from Complete Works


“Det var en feig ting å gjøre, men hun våget ikke annet.”
― Johan Harstad, quote from 172 Hours on the Moon


“Mother once told me that one had to lower one's head when passing under low eaves in order to avoid injury.”
― Anchee Min, quote from Empress Orchid


“You have to try even if it’s hard and you think you can never do it and you just want to scream and hide”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird


“Maybe that's what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.”
― Emily Giffin, quote from Love the One You're With


Interesting books

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
(313.9K)
Into Thin Air: A Per...
by Jon Krakauer
The Arabian Nights
(60.5K)
I Am Number Four
(282.6K)
I Am Number Four
by Pittacus Lore
The Hours
(112K)
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Twelfth Night
(135.8K)
Twelfth Night
by William Shakespeare
I Capture the Castle
(69.7K)
I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.