“No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.”

I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.

The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.

In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending.

I believe that the general growth in large [financial] institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically — I should say, fully — hedged.

But rules cannot substitute for character.

Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.

When trust is lost, a nation’s ability to transact business is palpably undermined.

It keeps interest rates lower than they otherwise would be and frees savings to finance increases in the capital stock, thereby boosting productivity and real incomes.

The number one problem in today’s generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.

I don’t think it’s possible for the Fed to end its easy-money policies in a trouble-free manner.

Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

The free lunch has still to be invented.

Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.

The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.

Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence.

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

No man wants to settle down. It happens. Eventually you’re going to bump into somebody that makes you go, ‘Hmm, I don’t mind seeing this person every day.’

I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.

If the Indy Racing League didn’t have the Indianapolis 500, do you think it would have lasted more than six months? No chance.

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

And there’s no question that it is a factor, but it’s preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.

No matter what is thrown at them, no matter how deep the hole, they find a way to bounce back and overcome adversity.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.