People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.

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

Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated.

Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.