Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.

If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.

The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.

The use of refined petroleum as fuel, which began in the 1850s, freed hundreds of millions of people from the toil of centuries, gave hundreds of millions more a life of ease and plenty, and, by allowing great cities to feed themselves from every corner of the world, multiplied the population of the earth fivefold.

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.