Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

I feel very angry when I think of brilliant, or even interesting, women whose minds are wasted on a home. Better have an affair. It isn't permanent and you keep your job.

No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.

No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.

Those who had been riding the upward wave decide now is the time to get out. Those who thought the increase would be forever find their illusion destroyed abruptly, and they, also, respond to the newly revealed reality by selling or trying to sell. And thus the rule, supported by the experience of centuries: the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.

No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.