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" The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do. "

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" I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards - where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street - that there's no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, 'We've got a wonderful profit center.' "

" I'm not speaking in favor of killing innovation. I'm speaking in favor of centrist use of the market, which involves necessarily a considerable degree of regulation. Markets by themselves will get themselves inevitably into inequality and into their own destruction. It will happen again and again. "

" I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray. "

" Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support. "

" Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs. "

" What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much. "

" The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows. "

" One of the pleasing things about science is that we do all climb towards the heavens on the shoulders of our predecessors. Economics, like physics, has its heroes, and the letter 'H' that I used in my mathematical equations was not there to honor Sir William Hamilton, but rather Harold Hotelling. "

" The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics. "

" The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas. "

" Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian. "

" The contrafactual history is what it would have been the other way. Think of the Kennedy triumph in the missiles crisis. Worked out fine. Khrushchev blinked and so forth. The other road, you don't want to think too hard about. You could have had nuclear missiles wiping out a tenth of the globe. "

" Every good cause is worth some inefficiency. "

" I decided that there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business, as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon: behind the bar and not in front of it. "

" Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism. "

" When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me? "

" I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it. "

" Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen. "

" Let those who will - write the nation's laws - if I can write its textbooks. "

" In 1936, money had no important role. Interest rates were one-eighth of one-eighth of one per cent. I did some research, and I found that the interest on one million dollars of ninety-day Treasuries was $37. People didn't even bother to collect it. The Fed wasn't important. "

" Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus. "

" There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either. "

" I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate. "

" Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does. "

" It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office. "

" Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise. "

" In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history. "

" My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words. "

" What I say is, 'If you're so rich, how come you're so dumb?' "

" The parts of physics that are exact are the parts of physics that are exact. The parts that are inexact are vastly greater. Sensible scientists don't waste their time pushing against doors that endlessly will not give. They are opportunistic and go where they can, but there are pitfalls in that. "