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.

Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.

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.

Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.

If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

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.