Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.

Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes - indeed, deletes - the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.

Those days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.