“For a country, everything will be lost when the jobs of an economist and a banker become highly respected professions.”

You have to study a great deal to know a little.

There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of Christ.

Human laws made to direct the will ought to give precepts, and not counsels.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

Liberty… is there only when there is no abuse of power.

Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!

Power ought to serve as a check to power.

If you would be holy, instruct your children, because all the good acts they perform will be imputed to you.

When we seek after wit, we discover only foolishness.

The power of divorce can be given only to those who feel the inconveniences of marriage, and who are sensible of the moment when it is for their interest to make them cease.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier that other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. you are comparing your lot with an ideal which is of course better and therefore you feel worse

Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones.

Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.

When the [law making] and [law enforcement] powers are united in the same person… there can be no liberty.

I think we’re in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy. So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up.

Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early ’90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007?

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

The benefit of appointing a hawkish central banker is the increased inflation-fighting credibility that such an appointment brings.

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.