It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.

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.

I've become accustomed to supporting politicians who are more conservative than I am. This is not entirely a surprise.

I accept the global complex and global trade more than do some of my liberal colleagues because I consider this a wise alternative to national tension and conflict.

The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.