Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.

If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover either for grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much-cherished aspect of academic freedom.

There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.