It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast – even the English can’t do it.
It’s much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.
If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.
Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.
It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
In public administration good sense would seem to require the public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize the eventual disappointment.
Happiness does not require an expanding economy.
The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.
Emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.
We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done.
I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I’m for that. Where the government is necessary, I’m for that. I’m deeply suspicious of somebody who says, ‘I’m in favor of privatization,’ or, ‘I’m deeply in favor of public ownership.’ I’m in favor of whatever works in the particular case.
It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.
My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.
Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.
One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.