There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I’m greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.
People are the common denominator of progress; no improvement is possible with unimproved people.
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
There’s a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.
Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.
The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.
The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.
We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil’s policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.