"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue."
"Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted."
"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."
"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."
"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."
"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."
"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."
"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."
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
"The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture."
"We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?"
"Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised."
"If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old."
"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."
"In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof."
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
"You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too."
"One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know."
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
"A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions."
"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."
"There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose."
