“I’m a plain soap kind of guy.”

And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction.

Senator, we are groping for understanding, the knowledge you assume I possess doesn’t exist’.

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.

Skilled shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. [Visa quotas] have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism.

Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds.

The recent period has been marked by a transformation to an economy that is more productive as competitive forces become increasingly intense and new technologies raise the efficiency of our businesses…

Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere.

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

Senator, if I seem clear to you, you must have misunderstood me’.

We may be in a rapidly evolving international financial system with all the bells and whistles of the so-called new economy. But the old-economy rules of prudence are as formidable as ever. We violate them at our own peril.

The Iraq War is largely about oil.

While these tendencies were no doubt in train in the “old,” pre-1990s economy, they accelerated over the past decade as a number of technologies with their roots in the cumulative innovations of the past half-century began to yield dramatic economic returns.

What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality.

Developing protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset.

It signals problems with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to it.

It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.

Even as a kid, I wore J.C. Penney plain-pocket jeans because they were plain pockets.

Mud can make you prisoner and the plains can make you dry.

Plain as a pike-staff.

I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.

All the things I thought I was – simple and plain and sometime funny – are very small words.

When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains

Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.