The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are not missed.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

The ideas by which people ... interpret their existence and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth.

Third party politics, at least since La Follette, has always had an element of romance.

The years of the Great Depression were a superb time for economists because people not knowing what could be done or what should be done would always assume that maybe an economist had the answer. If you were just a lawyer in Washington, you were nobody. But if you were an economist, you might have the answer.

Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the nuclear theologians ... Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons ... This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

Only the man who finds everything wrong and expects it to get worse is thought to have a clear brain.

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.

However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less -- and probably was much less -- than a million.

In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know.

Then the shit hit the fan.