All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.

Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.

I begin with the renaming of the system. It used to be capitalism. But that evokes [Karl] Marx and [John] Rockefeller. So now we speak of the market system. That is a nice bland expression, which forgets those off-color references.

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

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

Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.