No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn’t know itself.
It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.
Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.
You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.
Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?
Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.
In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading a syndicate that was driving the market down.
We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce.
In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.
Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.
The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning.
Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.
Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money.
The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.