“I love facts and figures. It’s like following a detective story, piecing together what’s going on in the economy.”

Regulation – which is based on force and fear – undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.

The need for values is inbred. Their content is not.

American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the word economy.

If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

Any onset of increased investor caution elevates risk premiums and, as a consequence, lowers asset values and promotes the liquidation of the debt that supported higher asset prices.

Unfortunately, Senator, nobody knows where the next innovative idea is coming from.

The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances.

The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed.

The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so…

I’m always amazed that my wife can handle different subjects – one day politics, the next day foreign policy.

Rules cannot take the place of character.

If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.

Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets.

Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.

The Hulk, Detective Comics, Action Comics, you name it. Seeing those old books got me interested in new comics, so my friends and I would hit the local comic shop every Saturday to pick up the cool titles of my generation.

I saw part of The Singing Detective on TV in New York. I said, Something is going on here.

We’re all like detectives. We want to figure things out. Life, you know, we want to figure out life, and we want to figure out what’s going on, so it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful that people are thinking.