“There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.”

Although the outlook is clouded by a number of uncertainties, the central tendencies of the projections .. imply continued good economic performance in the United States.

I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.

Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.

Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.

[Republicans] swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions.

This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets.

History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.

Such caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised questions of sustainability.

Derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks.

Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed.

It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations.

If I’ve made myself clear, I’ve misspoken.

…our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.

Excessive optimism sows the seeds of its own reversal.

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ‘hidden’ confiscation of wealth.

No matter how many times your amazing, absolutely brilliant work is rejected by the client, for whatever dopey, arbitrary reason, there is often another amazing, absolutely brilliant solution possible. Sometimes it’s even better.

No language is as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.

Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works – winning best actor is arbitrary.

I wanted to make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.

I started thinking about gender and how it’s an arbitrary thing if you’re born with an XX or XY chromosome, but it can determine your experience of the world. It’s about whether you are physically intimidating vs. being physically intimidated. It determines whether you are the one to take an active role in sex and society.

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.