Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.

Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

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.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

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.

It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast - even the English can't do it.