One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

I start ... from a belief in individual freedom and that derives fundamentally from a belief in the limitations of our knowledge, from a belief ... that nobody can be sure that what he believes is right, is really right ... I'm an imperfect human being who cannot be certain of anything, so what position ... involved the least intolerance on my part? ... The most attractive position ... is putting individual freedom first.

When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

I think it's a scandal what has been happening in the school system so far as lower income classes. The dropout rates, the illiteracy rate, you know literacy in the United States was a lot higher in 1890 than it is now.

What happened was that for every $100 of money, by which I mean the cash that people keep in their pockets, and the deposits they have in the bank, for every $100 of money that there was in 1929, by 1933 there was only $67. The Federal Reserve allowed the quantity of money to decline by a third. While, at all times, it had the possibilities and the power of preventing that from happening.

The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end.

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.