Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little
Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale
The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic.
If all else fails immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
I have never understood why one’s affections must be confined as once with women to a single country.
Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.
Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.