The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

If a man didn't make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated.

Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.

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