“If you look at payments to labor as a proportion of national income or gross domestic product, you find profits going way up, investment and savings going up.”

I don’t want to be able to see the audience

You get a constituency; you make them believe your promises, and then you turn them over to your financial campaign backers. That’s what politics has become and that’s as much an art of deception as economics is.

One of the big problems in America’s economic polarization and shrinkage is that pensions can’t be paid. So there are going to be defaults on pensions here, just like Europeans are insisting in rolling back pensions. You can look at Greece and Argentina as the future of America.

True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you.

I’ve forbidden my daughter to have grandchildren, I’m too young.

Money is not a factor of production. But in order to have access to credit, in order to get money, in order to get an education, you have to pay the banks.

Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, “Listen Godzilla, you don’t have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine”.

These $100 bills aren’t meant to circulate. They’re not to spend on goods and services. They’re a store of value. They’re a form of saving.

I don’t aim to offend.

On the flat tax, the more you compress the tax rates, the more you untax where the income is really made, at the top of the pyramid.

Emotional stability and expression comes from women.

When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that “real wealth.” It exposes what’s wrong in the mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage is in the textbooks is not scientific.

A science is not mere knowledge, it is knowledge which has undergone a process of intellectual digestion. It is the grasp of many things brought together in one, and hence is its power; for, properly speaking, it is Science that is power, not Knowledge.

Russia was under the impression that the neoliberal advisors were going to make Russia as rich as the United States. What they really did was create a kleptocracy that was virtually tax-free.

When you say “paying the banks,” what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.

There are two definitions of deflation. Most people think of it simply as prices going down. But debt deflation is what happens when people have to spend more and more of their income to carry the debts that they’ve run up – to pay their mortgage debt, to pay the credit card debt, to pay student loans.

Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating

The one thing you can rely on is if you get disturbed halfway through a painting and it looks a bit naff, then someone will preserve that piece, remove it and a few months later it’ll be paraded round Sotheby’s by people wearing white gloves.

Omni is not a science magazine. It is a magazine about the future…Omni was sui generis. Although there were plenty of science magazines over the years…Omni was the first magazine to slant all its pieces toward the future. It was fun to read and gorgeous to look at.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

I want people to look at my films and say ‘Wow, she’s a good actress’, and I know I’ll have to work hard for that.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they’ve read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

Leaders should never, ever try to look cool – that’s for dictators

If you look at the history of advertising, most of them were Jews, so it was only a matter of time before ‘Mad Men’ explored that area of advertising.