Throughout early modernity there were very strong pressures on Jews to assimilate. Assimilating meant cutting your ties with the community of origin.

A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.

I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.

I did not and do not think of the solidity-liquidity conundrum as a dichotomy; I view those two conditions as a couple locked, inseparably, in a dialectical bond.

You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest

Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, "a wholly different kind of ball-game".

There were no "unemployed" in the impoverished Polish countryside before the Second World War. Not a single unemployed. Every child that was born in the peasant family had his room at the table and his job in the field, stable or pigsty... If there was not enough food, everybody got less. If food was plentiful, everybody ate better. In such a setting, we may say, the problem of security couldn't even arise... One was born with life-long rights; the only thing that one could not do was to change them. A setting good on the side of security, though bad on the side of freedom.