Sourced

• I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall Street men are fond of company and sport. A man makes one hundred thousand dollars there and immediately buys a yacht, begins to race fast horses, and becomes a sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and books of my library. Every man has natural inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to make me particularly popular in Wall Street, and I cannot help that.
  • Comment to a reporter, quoted in Maury Klein's The Life and Legend of Jay Gould

• The effect of this policy will be to annihilate the Indians & so greatly benefit us.
  • From a letter to a business associate, quoted in Maury Klein's The Life and Legend of Jay Gould

Attributed

• I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
  • On his strikebreaking activities during the .
  • Widely quoted, see for example The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman, Little Brown, October 1985, ISBN 0-316-27301-5.

About

• Gould lets everyone carry out his own corpse.
  • Jim Fisk
• I do not believe that since man was in the habit of living on this planet anyone has ever lived possessed of the impudence of Jay Gould.
  • Robert G. Ingersoll, in Richard O'Connor, Gould's Millions, Greenwood Press, 1973, ISBN 0-837-16875-9, p. 132.