 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. |
| 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. |
| There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth. |
| The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. |
| The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture. |
| The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know. |
| The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor. |
| We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography? |
| 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. |
| If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old. |
| In economics, the majority is always wrong. |
| The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. |
| 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. |
| Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not. |
| Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. |
| It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation. |
| In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes. |
