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

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

The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.

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

Somebody told me ... that he overheard a banker's wife saying her husband was working for free this year-this was 2009. What she meant was, he was just getting his basic salary of £300,000, and no bonus. Their sense of entitlement is, in the proper sense of the word, psychotic.

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.

In other words, RBS had its origins in a failed speculation, a bail-out, and a financial crash so big it helped destroy Scotland's status as a separate nation.