There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.
Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.
When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder...
Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man’s greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.
Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.
No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.
Power is as power does.
The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.
Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.
What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve.
Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.
Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.
The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.
The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles.
In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.
Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence.
Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.
Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.