Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself... Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government.

Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.

Good questions outrank easy answers.

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.

Good questions outrank easy answers.

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.

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.