Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.

The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men.

When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.

An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.