The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
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.
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
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.
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.
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.
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
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.
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.
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
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.