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

Monetary policy suffers from the unfortunate absence of any occult effect. It has long been clear that economic management...would be greatly facilitated if resort could occasionally be had to witchcraft.

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.

There was the Missile Crisis, but one can't attribute to the [J.F.] Kennedy years anything like the problems that [Franklin] Roosevelt stood over and surmounted.

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.

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.