There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater. What do we worry about? We worry about our schools. We worry about our public recreational facilities. We worry about our law enforcement and our public housing. All of the things that bear upon our standard of living are in the public sector.

My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.

Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.

Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.

I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut.