We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.

Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.

All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.

The individual serves the planning system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it far more by consuming its products.