When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder.

Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.

I've become accustomed to supporting politicians who are more conservative than I am. This is not entirely a surprise.

Things that come from the private sector are in abundant supply; things that depend on the public sector are widely a problem. We're a world, as I said in The Affluent Society, of filthy streets and clean houses, poor schools and expensive television.

The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years.

A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory...allows us to believe that the modern experience of....debt...is in any way a new phenomenon.

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.