We have a swarm of people in the stock market - not out of knowledge, not out of expectation, but out of basically a gambling instinct, the hope that prices will go up.

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

No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.

Economic stimulation that works through the increased outlays to the affluent has, inevitably, an aspect of soundness and sanity that is lacking in expenditure on behalf of the undeserving poor.

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.

Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.