[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was the central world figure in the two great disasters of this century - the Great Depression and World War II. By contrast, JFK came in relatively peaceful, agreeable times.

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done.

Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be.

In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.

Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.