Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

Those days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.

Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.

A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.