But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated.

If you get a reputation for being honest, you have 95 percent of the competition already beat.

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

In public administration good sense would seem to require that public expectation be kept at the lowest possible level in order to minimize eventual disappointment.

Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego.

There is little that can be said about most economic goods. A toothbrush does little but clean teeth. Aspirin does little but dull pain. Alcohol is important mostly for making people more or less drunk ... There being so little to be said, much is to be invented.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.