Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject.

Richness, the ideas of having plenty of money, is not ... an absolute state. Richness is about the amount of money you have compared to the people you see around you. It is about where you are in relation to others, and where they are in relation to you ... and whether you can have the things you want and other people have.

We wouldn't care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did.

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.

It's as if people used the invention of seat belts as an opportunity to take up drunk driving.

In an ideal world, one populated by vegetarians and Esperanto speakers, derivatives would be used for one thing only: reducing levels of risk. The list of individual traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short.

But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.