Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.

Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

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.

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

The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.