Our economic problems worry me much less than our political solutions, which have a far worse track record.

How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?

All too often, we do smart things only after exhausting every conceivable dumb thing we could have done.

Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored.

If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

Intellect is not wisdom.

Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty discrimination and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.