If you're rich you can buy books. If you're poor, you need a library.

If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.

For the sake of The Progressive, I will say that [Robert] La Follette was relevant, but he was the last.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.

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.