It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.
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.
Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.
If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.
A good rule of conversation is never answer a foolish question.
At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean.
Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy.
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses.
The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.
The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.
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.
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut.
According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
Were it part of our everyday education and comment that the corporation is an instrument for the exercise of power, that it belongs to the process by which we are governed, there would then be debate on how that power is used and how it might be made subordinate to the public will and need. This debate is avoided by propagating the myth that the power does not exist.
In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.
If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.
It is possible that people need to believe they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively.
Happiness does not require an expanding economy
No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.
A wrong decision isn't forever; it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved.
Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.
The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.
I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.
The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.
When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.
Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
Nothing so denies a person liberty as the total absence of money.
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.
Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.
When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble - until the day of disaster.
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office.
Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.
No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
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.
If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).
The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing.
I would put primary emphasis on a good standard of living equitably distributed. It can't be equal, but one that eliminates the terrible cruelty of poverty.
Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.
Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
One must always have in mind one simple fact - there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.
Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.
I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.
The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.
In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.
This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture.
There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class.
Almost every aspect of its (Federal Reserve) history should be approached with a discriminating disregard for what is commonly taught or believed.
Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes - indeed, deletes - the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.
With the American failure came world failure.
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption and more income to sustain it-a struggle that modern corporations, modern unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage-will drive up prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between inflation, unemployment, or controls.
I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, 'I'm in favor of privatization,' or, 'I'm deeply in favor of public ownership.' I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case.
The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
Even in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane. But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them.
The stock market is but a mirror which provides an image of the underlying or fundamental economic situation. Cause and effect run from the economy to the stock market, never the reverse. In 1929 the economy was headed for trouble. Eventually that trouble was violently reflected in Wall Street.
In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.
The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
It's great to be with William Buckley, because you don't have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you're right.
Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.
Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.
The Senate has unlimited debate; in the House, debate is ruthlessly circumscribed. There is frequent discussion as to which technique most effectively frustrates democratic process.
Smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.
People are the common denominator of progress. So no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development. But we are coming to realize that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
Much of the world's work, it has been said, is done by men who do not feel quite well. Marx is a case in point.
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 even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.
There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.
When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.
Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.
Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.
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.
To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time.
The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.
A point must be repeated: only the pathological weakness of the financial memory...allows us to believe that the modern experience of....debt...is in any way a new phenomenon.
World War II revealed two of the enduring features of the Keynesian Revolution. One was the moral difference between spending for welfare and spending for war. During the Depression very modest outlays for the unemployed seemed socially debilitating, economically unsound. Now expenditures many times greater for weapons and soldiers were perfectly safe. It's a difference that still persists.
Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
Economic stimulation that works through the increased outlays to the affluent has, inevitably, an aspect of soundness and sanity that is lacking in expenditure on behalf of the undeserving poor.
