The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.

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.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.

I begin with the renaming of the system. It used to be capitalism. But that evokes [Karl] Marx and [John] Rockefeller. So now we speak of the market system. That is a nice bland expression, which forgets those off-color references.

My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

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.