The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

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.

Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.

The ideas by which people . . . interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.

No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.