“Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.”

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

The companies could hire the educated workers they need. And those workers would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality.

I have one other issue I’d like to throw on the table. I hesitate to do it, but let me tell you some of the issues that are involved here.

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices.

There is no safe store of value. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth.

At the risk of some oversimplification, if the skill composition of our work force meshed fully with the needs of our increasingly complex capital-stock, wage-skill differentials would be stable.

And she always has so much fun doing it. We make a good team.

I’ve been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I’ve never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I’m not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it’s got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.

As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.

Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

I have long argued that paying down the national debt is beneficial for the economy.

Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.

To speak another language is to have another soul

I’m so tough and so bad, I can be humble and lift another guy up.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order.

If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

What I might feel like is hard work, another person is dying to do.

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.

If I never make another dollar, I am proud. I did what I wanted to do.

Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.