I do the best with what exists.

There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

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.

In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.

A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory...allows us to believe that the modern experience of....debt...is in any way a new phenomenon.

Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.

Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.