Eric Dale Quotes in Margin Call (2011)

Eric Dale: I run risk management... it just doesn't seem like a natural place to start cutting.

Will Emerson: Well, you're a better man than me.

Eric Dale: That's always been true.

Sarah Robertson: At the time, it didn't seem like there was much of a choice.

Eric Dale: It never does.

Eric Dale: Do you know I built a bridge once?

Will Emerson: Sorry?

Eric Dale: A bridge.

Will Emerson: No, I didn't know that.

Eric Dale: I was an engineer by trade.

Will Emerson: Hmmm... hmmm

Eric Dale: It went from Dilles Bottom, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia. It spanned nine hundred and twelve feet above the Ohio River. Twelve thousand people used this thing a day. And it cut out thirty-five miles of driving each way between Wheeling and New Martinsville. That's a combined 847,000 miles of driving a day. Or 25,410,000 miles a month. And 304,920,000 miles a year. Saved. Now I completed that project in 1986, that's twenty-two years ago. So over the life of that one bridge, that's 6,708,240,000 miles that haven't had to be driven. At, what, let's say fifty miles an hour. So that's, what, 134,165,800 hours, or 559,020 days. So that one little bridge has saved the people of those communities a combined 1,531 years of their lives not wasted in a fucking car. One thousand five hundred and thirty-one years.

Sarah Robertson: I didn't think they were going to be able to get you back here.

Eric Dale: Well, they told me they were going to drag me through hell on everything for the next two years - my options, my healthcare. Or I could come back here and make, uh, 176,471 dollars an hour to sit quietly in this room. Didn't seem like much of a choice.

Sarah Robertson: It never is.