Skip to content

Hetty Green Quotes

19 quotes from Hetty Green — Financier known as 'the Witch of Wall Street.' The richest woman in America during the Gilded Age..

There is no great secret in fortune making. All you do is buy cheap and sell dear, act with thrift and shrewdness and be persistent.

Finance

More money is made in the end by an over-supply of caution than by indiscriminate recklessness.

Caution

I buy when things are low and no one wants them. I keep them until they go up, and people are crazy to get them.

Investment

A good business woman is often sharper than a good business man.

Gender

Railroads and real estate are the things I like. Before deciding on an investment, I seek out every kind of information about it.

Investment

When I see a thing, going cheap because nobody wants it, I buy a lot of it and tuck it away. Then, when the time comes, they have to hunt me up and pay me a good price for my holdings.

Investment

For forty years I have had to fight every inch of the way.

Perseverance

As long as women won't save we're not likely to have many women millionaires in this country.

Gender

I saw the handwriting on the wall and began quietly to call in my money…

Finance

When the crash came I had money, and I was one of the very few who really had it.

Finance

I always try to deal justly with everyone. But if anyone wants to fight me I'll give him all the fight he wants.

Justice

American women would be much happier, if they learned the principles of business in girlhood.

Education

So vast an improbability is practically an impossibility. Such evanescent shadows of probability cannot belong to actual life. They are unimaginably less than those least things which the law cares not for.

Benjamin Peirce, Perkins Professor of Mathematics, Harvard

I buy when things are low and nobody wants them. I keep them until they go up and people are crazy to get them. That is, I believe, the secret of all successful business.

Hetty Green

Up to now Huntington, you have dealt with Hetty Green the business woman. Now you are fighting Hetty Green the mother. Harm one hair of Ned's head, and I'll put a bullet through your heart.

Hetty Green, to Collis P. Huntington

I go my own way, take no partners, risk nobody else's fortune.

Hetty Green

Before deciding on an investment, I seek out every kind of information about it. There is no secret in fortune making. All you have to do is buy cheap and sell dear, act with thrift and shrewdness and be persistent.

Hetty Green

When the crash came I had money, and I was one of the very few who really had it. The others had their 'securities' and their 'values.' I had the cash and they had to come to me.

Hetty Green

One thing, however, has been wrongly attributed to me, and that is speculating. I never speculate. Such stocks as belong to me were purchased simply as an investment, never on a margin.

Hetty Green, on speculation

Continue exploring