Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

Then the shit hit the fan.

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

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...

The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy...

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the...

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....

That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable...

None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have...

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has...

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and...

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.

The members of the functional and socially mobilized under class must, in some very real way, be seen as the architects of their own fate. If not, they could be, however marginally, on the conscience...

There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.

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...

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 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.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and...

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

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little