“Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices.”

I didn’t believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn’t prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

It is decidedly not true that “nice guys finish last,” as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.

Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.

Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves.

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.

Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures.

Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which… public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.

Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.

Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up.

I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism.

Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.

All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.

The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.

I don’t think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It’s the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.