“If prices go down, we will have problems – problems in the sense of spillover to other areas.”

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.

Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.

There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.

I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.

We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.

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.

The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.

Public art existed all along, but ecological art just naturally grew out of my thinking and writings in that area for years.

This is where men and women are different, we can put aside petty competition for relationships – they can’t. It interferes.

Never fly straight and level for more than 30 seconds in the combat area.

Let’s try to discover areas we can work together. That’s fine. We’re two a world power.

Everyone is sort of in their own little area counting lines and no one talks when film’s not rolling. There’s constantly actors coming to me back behind the monitor screaming at me, “Why did my line count drop?” It’s a nasty tense environment.

You shape your own life, and the shape of your life is determined to a great extent by your attitude. This is an area that you can control, and in learning how to control and direct it, you will have great power over what is going to happen.

I love travelling, and had the pleasure of being in the most developed country in the world and then parts of two of the most pristine natural areas of the world: the Galapagos islands and the Equador Amazon jungle.