In economics, the majority is always wrong.
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy – what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.
Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.
The happiest time of anyone’s life is just after the first divorce.
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
I’ve been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply; things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We’re a world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean houses, poor schools and expensive television.