Sam Miller
age 88, co-chairman and Treasurer, Forest City Enterprises
Power is the ability to do good or evil. Once you depart from the path of goodness, you are now using your power for evil. You’re pulling God’s beard when you don’t have to.
My power is diminishing because I can’t call the cemetery.
You become influential not by trying to become influential but by giving. Giving of yourself.
My mother taught me from an early age that no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted. The very person that, let’s say, is a precinct committeeman, a relative nobody politically — one day, you wake up and discover he’s a senator for the state. When you helped him as a precinct committeeman, that he’ll never forget. Compared to helping him as a senator, there’s so many other hundreds of people that’ll help him, it’s a non sequitur.
I also learned — and this was in The Wall Street Journal many years ago — to answer my own phone and never ask who’s calling.
You have no idea how people appreciate all these little things.
If I would get angry, a Chinese aphorism came to me: Always, in a moment of great rage, one second’s hesitation can save you a thousand years of sorrow.
The lesson I learned from [Gov.] Jim Rhodes was, the greatest gift that God can bestow on anybody is humility. But once you recognize that you’re humble, you’ve lost that talent. You’re no longer humble. So when I would talk to Jim, he would say, “Listen. Just remember one thing: If anybody tells you you’re great, watch out. Turn around and tell ’em you’re not the greatest. You’re just the least worst.”
When I want to get an economic forecast, or I want to know how business is, I ask the parking lot attendant or the taxi cab driver. The taxi cab driver can tell me right away how his fares are going. If he’s busy, business is good. And the guy in the parking lot, he can tell me almost to a T the characteristics of the people that are parking there. Because he has discovered something I’ve known for a long time: The guys who drive the fanciest cars give the smallest tips.
I hate journalists. I believe what Napoleon once said: He would rather face 10,000 drawn bayonets than one hostile newspaper reporter.
I have all kinds of walls here. [Points around his office, covered in framed pictures.] That’s my Catholic wall, my Jewish wall, my social wall.
See that sticker there? Do you know whose face is covered? Clinton. I can’t stand looking at the son of a bitch. He disgraced my country. This guy turned the White House into a whorehouse. [I covered him up] the day I learned about the cigar-smoking incident.
Eleanor, tell him how many years you’ve been here with me! Any guy who can keep a secretary for 59 years with no sex has gotta be a goddamned decent person. Remember that.
Would you like a crucifix blessed by Benedict XVI? Don’t you lose it now! The last time I was with Benedict XVI was — Eleanor, when was Benedict XVI in Washington? Was it this year or last year? Last year.
We used to be an immigrant-friendly city. Now what some of these plutocrats, or aristocrats, or call them whatever you will, refuse to recognize is that even the Pilgrims were immigrants. What built this city were the Rockefellers, and the steel titans, and the oilmen and so forth. They came from immigrants.
My doctor told me, retire and expire. [But] that thing in your head is a muscle, no different than the bicep in your arm. If tomorrow morning I asked you to bind up your arm, pretend it was broken and not to use it for a period of 30 days, you wouldn’t be able to lift that pencil. Your brain is no different. Once you stop using that brain, you’re on your way.