There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.

Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.

Ralph [ Nader] is an old friend of mine, and he does a useful job in displaying a position.

This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.

Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.