The Race Goes Not to the Swift . . .

Nor bread to the wise, as Ecclesiastes says. Proof can be found in the latest issue of GQ magazine, which has an interview with Ted Turner, a man "worth" $2 billion. Some highlights:

The sad thing about destroying the environment is that we're going to take the rest of life with us. The bluebirds will be gone, and the elephants will be gone, and the tigers will be gone, and the pandas will be gone. I don't like the idea of losing pandas or crocodiles or alligators. I just . . . you know, I think they're cool. I like snakes. I like hummingbirds. There's nothing on earth I don't like. Frogs. Salamanders. The bunnies, the giraffes, the hippopotamuses.

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Oh yeah, I've been almost everywhere. I've been to over sixty countries.

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What was North Korea like? I had a great time there! I was there last year. They were nice to me. There weren't a lot of fat people walking around. They were all thin. And being thin is healthier than being fat.

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You don't see North Korea as a threat? Awwh! Their economy is not as big as Cleveland, Ohio! Does Cleveland, Ohio, pose a threat to the U.S.?

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With your philanthropy and investments that didn't work out, you've lost a big chunk of money in the past few years. Well,yeah! I lost 80 percent of my wealth and then gave away over half of the rest. So I'm a man of modest means now. But if you budget carefully and watch your expenditures, you can get by on a couple billion dollars. You know, you don't have to have twenty billion. You can squeeze by with a couple billion.

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Do you think you've been lucky or blessed in anyway? There had to be a lot of luck. If you were unlucky, you'd be born a mosquito. Or a mouse. What can a mouse do? I got all the luck in my family. My sister died when she was 17, after a lengthy illness. My father killed himself when he was 53. He had depression. My father used to say, "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of man can achieve!" That's why I know that we can get rid of nuclear weapons. A lot of people that are really into this don't think it's possible. But CNN was impossible. I've done the impossible many times. The word does not exist for me. I've got a lot of signal flags in my flag bag, but there's not a white one in there. I don't know what surrender means. I'm gonna keep fighting until the day I die, and I might keep on fighting afterwards—depends on where I am.