“Life is not a multiple choice test, it’s an open-book essay exam.”

And there would be an inventory pileup. And then – bam – businesses would react, sometimes violently, by cutting production.

His stellar record suggests that the only right answer to the age-old question of whether it is better to be lucky or good may be: both.

Murphys law of economic policy’: Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed.

If you try to give an on-the-one-hand-or-the-other- hand answer, only one of the hands tends to get quoted.

In the classic old business cycle, there would be a diminution in sales; it would take a little while for this information to reach corporate headquarters.

Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond [to it].

The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth.

They have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.

And the maestro surely wielded the chairman’s baton with extraordinary skill.

There is a kind of a cascading chain, … If one can’t sell, then that business doesn’t buy and that means the next business doesn’t sell, and the previous business doesn’t sell, and so on.

Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.

I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.

Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.

Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.

Life isn’t like coursework, baby. It’s one damn essay crisis after another.

There’s a Washington standard of casually putting things off the record. It’s really gone too far. I don’t know an easy way to turn it back.