There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.

In waiting for the glorious moment of that first book contract, writers must have giant reservoirs of patience. Yet they must persevere because they don't know the destiny that is being worked out for them. They creep humbly along the ground, without the spacious aerial vision of their lives that would show them the destiny in store for them.

After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.

I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.