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The role of private equity as fiduciaries is certainly to make money.

I think good private equity investors create a lot more economic value than they destroy.

We really wake up every day trying to build businesses. That is the goal of private equity. It's a misnomer out there that private equity profits by shrinking companies. In fact, it's just the opposite. Private equity creates value by growing great companies.

It's clear to me when you do private equity well, you're making companies more efficient and helping them grow and become more profitable. That success means our investors - such as public pension funds - benefit, which contributes to the economic wealth of society.

There's a number of companies clearly that we wish we had invested in either at the early or at the moderate stage.

I'm very, very bullish about our prospects, and as I tell our board, as I tell our employees, this is the time to invest. There's so much opportunity. Let's just invest in that opportunity, and really get after it.

The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient.

We've got to move beyond the idea that the public and private sectors are at odds. Government has to lay the groundwork for private equity to productively invest in things like education. It's a partnership, not a battle.

We need to make investment to get the economy going again, to give the private sector the confidence.

We're only going to invest our shareholders' money where we think they can get the kind of returns they expected when they invested their money with Exxon Mobil.