The Wolf of Wall Street is a memoir by former stockbroker and trader Jordan Belfort, first published in September 2007 by Bantam Books, then adapted into a 2013 film of the same name (directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort). Belfort tells his real-life story of creating Stratton Oakmont, a brokerage house engaged in pump and dump schemes with penny stocks.
The firm was shut down by regulators in the late 1990s, and Belfort was jailed for securities fraud. The movie depicts Jordan Belfort’s reckless adventures from his rise to a wealthy stockbroker to his seduction and free-fall into corruption, drug abuse, excess and ultimately imprisonment. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, along with some moral censure.
It was a major commercial success, with praise for Scorsese’s direction, the comedic performance of DiCaprio and the fast-paced and consistent humor. The film sparked controversy over its morally ambiguous depiction of events, lack of sympathy for victims, explicit sexual content, extreme profanity, depiction of hard drug use, and the use of animals during production. It set a Guinness World Record for the most instances of swearing in a film.
The Wolf of Wall Street quotes (the book)
Some of the best quotes from The Wolf of Wall Street (the book) are listed below.
- “97% of the people who quit too soon are employed by the 3% who didn’t.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Act as if! Act as if you’re a wealthy man, rich already, and then you’ll surely become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence and then people will surely have confidence in you.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Hard work beats talent. Every time!” – Jordan Belfort
- “I believe in total immersion, if you want to be rich, you have to program your mind to be rich. You have to unlearn all the thoughts that were making you poor and replace them with new thoughts – rich thoughts.” – Jordan Belfort
- “I want you to back yourself into a corner. Give yourself no choice but to succeed. Let the consequences of failure become so dire and so unthinkable that you’ll have no choice but to do whatever it takes to succeed.” – Jordan Belfort
- “I’ve got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?” – Jordan Belfort
- “If I earn a million dollars a week and the average American earns a thousand dollars a week, then when I spend twenty thousand dollars on something it’s the equivalent of the average American spending twenty dollars on something, right?” – Jordan Belfort
- “If you want to be rich, never give up. People tend to give up. If you have persistence, you will come out ahead of most people. More importantly, you will learn. When you do something, you might fail. But that’s not because you’re a failure. It’s because you have not learnt enough. Do it differently each time. One day, you will do it right. Failure is your friend.” – Jordan Belfort
- “It’s business. Leave your emotions at the door.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Money is the oxygen of capitalism and I wanna breathe more than any man alive.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Successful people are 100% convinced that they are masters of their own destiny, they’re not creatures of circumstance, they create circumstance, if the circumstances around them suck they change them.” – Jordan Belfort
- “The easiest way to make money is – create something of such value that everybody wants and go out and give and create value, the money comes automatically.” – Jordan Belfort
- “The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.” – Jordan Belfort
- “When you live your life by poor standards, you inflict damage on everyone who crosses your path, especially those you love.” – Jordan Belfort
- “You don’t choose who you fall in love with, do you? And once you do fall in love–that obsessive sort of love, that all-consuming love, where two people can’t stand to be apart from each other for even a moment–how are you supposed to let a love like that pass you by?” – Jordan Belfort
The Wolf of Wall Street quotes (the movie)
Some of the best quotes from The Wolf of Wall Street (the movie) are listed below.
- “Always keep the client on the Ferris wheel.” – Mark Hanna
- “But before you depart this room full of winners, I want you to take a good look at the person next to you. Go on. Because sometime in the not-so-distant future, you’re gonna be pulling up at a red light, in your beat-up old fucking Pinto, and that person’s gonna be pulling up right alongside you in their brand new Porsche. With their beautiful wife by their side, who’s got big voluptuous tits. And who’re you gonna be sitting next to? Some disgusting wildebeest with three days of razor-stubble, in a sleeveless muumuu, crammed in next to you in a carload full of groceries from the fucking Price Club. That’s who you’re gonna be sitting next to!” – Jordan Belfort
- “Every person around here, they want to get rich and they want to get rich quickly. They all want something for nothing.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Fugayzi, fugazi. It’s a whazy. It’s a woozie. It’s fairy dust. it doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real.” – Mark Hanna
- “Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket. I myself, I jerk off at least twice a day.” – Mark Hanna
- “Her father is the brother of my mom. Like, we grew up together, and she grew up hot, you know, she fucking grew up hot. And all my friends are trying to fuck her, you know, and I’m not gonna let one of these assholes fuck my cousin. So I used the cousin thing, as like, an in with her. I’m not like, gonna let someone else fuck my cousin, you know? If anyone’s gonna fuck my cousin, it’s gonna be me. Out of respect.” – Donnie Azoff
- “I am not gonna die sober!” – Jordan Belfort
- “I want you to deal with your problems by becoming rich!” – Jordan Belfort
- “I’ll tell you what: I’m never eating at Benihana again. I don’t care whose birthday it is.” – Donnie Azoff
- “I’m not fucking leaving! The show goes on!” – Jordan Belfort
- “If anyone over here thinks I’m superficial or materialistic, go get a job at McDonald’s because that’s where you belong.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Implosions are ugly. Pop off to the bathroom, work one out any time you can. When you get really good at it, you’ll fucking be stroking and you’ll be thinking about money.” – Mark Hanna
- “It was obscene, in the real world. But who the fuck wanted to live there?” – Jordan Belfort
- “Just like that I made two grand, the other guys looked at me like I just discovered fire.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Let me give you some legal advice: Shut the fuck up!” – Agent Patrick Denham
- “Let me tell you something. There is no nobility in poverty. I have been a rich man and I have been a poor man. And I choose rich every fucking time. Because at least as a rich man, when I have to face my problems, I show up in the back of a limo, wearing a $2,000 suit and a $40,000 gold fucking watch!” – Jordan Belfort
- “Look, man… a lot of having a kid or whatever takes risk, whether you’re fuckin’ cousins or not, you know…” – Donnie Azoff
- “My killers, my killers who will not take ‘No’ for an answer. My fucking warriors, who will not hang up the phone till their client either buys. Or fucking dies!” – Jordan Belfort
- “My name is Jordan Belfort. The year I turned 26, I made 49 million dollars, which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Oh my God! You had to deal with the Golf Course people too! What a greek tragedy! Honey oh my God!, you probably had to pay them in cash with your hands! What a fucking burden, and actually had to do some work besides swiping my fucking credit card all day? Huh? Cause I can’t keep track of your professions honey! Last month you were a wine connoisseur, and now you’re an aspiring landscape architect, Isn’t that right?” – Jordan Belfort
- “OK, first rule of Wall Street – Nobody – and I don’t care if you’re Warren Buffet or Jimmy Buffet – nobody knows if a stock’s going up, down or f-ing sideways, least of all stockbrokers. But we have to pretend we know.” – Mark Hanna
- “On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month. I take Quaalude’s 10-15 times a day for my “back pain”, Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine… Well, because it’s awesome.” – Jordan Belfort
- “One thing I can promise you is that I never ask my clients to judge me on my winners, I ask them to judge me on my losers because I have so few.” – Jordan Belfort
- “See those little black boxes? They’re called telephones. I’m gonna let you in on a little secret about these telephones. They’re not gonna dial themselves. Okay? Without you, they’re just worthless hunks of plastic. Like a loaded M16 without a trained marine to pull the trigger.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Sell me this pen.” – Jordan Belfort
- “So you listen to me and you listen well. Are you behind on you credit card bills? Good, pick up the phone and start dialing! Is your landlord ready to evict you? Good! Pick up the phone and start dialing! Does your girlfriend think you’re fucking worthless loser? Good! Pick up the phone and start dialing! I want you to deal with your problems by becoming rich!” – Jordan Belfort
- “Still, give them to me young, hungry, and stupid. And in no time, I will make them rich.” – Jordan Belfort
- “The name of the game, moving the money from the client’s pocket to your pocket.” – Mark Hanna
- “There are two keys to success in the broker business; first of all you gotta stay relaxed, secondly you gotta always get stay high.” – Mark Hanna
- “There is no such thing as bad publicity. Your hair looks good.” – Teresa Petrillo
- “There was this one time I was selling pot to this Amish dude. You know those guys who got like the beard with, like, no mustache or some bullshit? Well, he says that he only wants to make furniture.” – Alden Kupferberg
- “They’re gonna need a fucking wrecking ball to take me out of here. They’re gonna need to send in the national guard or fucking swat team, cause I ain’t going nowhere!” – Jordan Belfort
- “Was all this legal? Absolutely not but we were making more money then we knew what to do with.” – Jordan Belfort
- “Well, basically, you know, if the kid was retarded I would… I would, you know, drive it up to the country and just like, you know, open the door and let it… say “You’re free now!” You know? Like, “Run free!” You know?” – Donnie Azoff
- “Yeah, like Buddhists. They don’t give a shit about money. They’re wrapped in sheets. They’re not buying shit.” – Alden Kupferberg
- “You be ferocious, you be relentless, you be telephone fucking terrorists” – Jordan Belfort
- “You got my money taped to your tits, honey. Technically, you do work for me.” – Donnie Azoff
- “You know, just… people say s**t. I don’t even know. I don’t even listen to it half the time.” – Jordan Belfort
- “You see money doesn’t just buy you a better life, better food, better cars, better women, it makes you actually a better person. You can give generously to your church or political party of your choice.” – Jordan Belfort
- “You wanna know what money sounds like? Go to a trading floor on Wall Street.” – Jordan Belfort
