Nothing is so clear in history that is it happens for any one thing. It seems that a lot of things come together to make great changes.

Everybody's got a worldview, whether they know they have it or they don't. They might even get it when they are little tiny kids. Suppose they get it when they are in college, which is often the case, or in high school, whatever. Everything they learn after that or every thing they see after that, they fit it into that worldview. And they are making coherence of what's good, what's bad, what will work, what won't work, what's noble, what's ignoble, and so on... all through this filter.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

I was so grateful to be independent of the academic establishment. I thought, how awful it would be to have my future hinge on such people and such decisions.

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields.

The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.