Nick Hanauer Quotations

Government does create prosperity and growth by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive; balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism - it's essential to it.

Business people do two things with their time fundamentally. The first is that they try to create sales, right? Revenue, key to business. But the other thing they devote their time to equally is cost containment. That is to say, how to not create jobs. Because the fewer jobs you can create for the revenue you create, the more profit you make.

All human endeavor, all human civilization, is the act of solving collective action problems. Should we put out our own fires, or should we have a fire department? Should we build roads, or should we hack our way through the woods from one factory to another?

A thriving middle class is the source of growth in a technological, capitalist economy. Investing in the middle class is the most pro-business thing you can do.

The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.

The only really expensive thing in our family budget, frankly, is private air travel.

The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

Prosperity isn't something that squirts out of rich people.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

I'm not the world's best philosopher. But I am one of the world's best strategists. I will put my strategic abilities against anybody on Earth.