Anyone who says he won’t resign four times, will.
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
There’s no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.
In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.
From the spring of 1941, I controlled all prices in the United States. You could lower a price without my permission, but you couldn’t raise a price without my permission or that of my staff.
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
It takes a certain brashness to attack the accepted economic legendsbut noneat all toperpetuatethem. So theyare perpetuated.
In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.
We talk of the enormous virtues of work, but it turns out that that is mostly for the poor. If you’re rich enough or if you’re a college professor, the virtue lies in leisure and the use you make of your leisure time.
Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the the most unpredictable in their consequences.
While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.
A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.
I think without a doubt, that what is called “financial genius” is merely a rising market.