Taxes are not good things, but if you want services, somebody's got to pay for them so they're a necessary evil. - Michael Bloomberg

On his performance in college: "I was the one of those students who made the top half of the class possible."

On his controversial initiative "Opportunity NYC": "Now, you might say, 'why should we pay people for doing what they're supposed to do?' It's a fair question -- but think of it this way. Every other anti-poverty program that's been tried has failed to get the national poverty rate below 11 percent. … Why shouldn't we experiment with a program built around the one strategy that has proven time and again to work wonders -- capitalism?"

“I don't know if Bernie Madoff got his idea from there, but if there's ever a Ponzi scheme, people say Madoff was the biggest? Wrong. Social Security is, far and away,"