If we were not in Vietnam, all that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves.

It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the dispiriting voices of doubt be muted and that there should be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.

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.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.