“The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.”

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves.

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

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

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.

Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures.

Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.

Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.

There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.

I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.

We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.

I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.

The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.

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].

Human nature, as we know it, is in a formative state. It is being changed into the image of the thing it loves.

When diving to attack always leave a proportion of your formation above to act as top guard.

But the revolutions and changes which are responsible for the present state of the earth are not limited to the upsetting of the ancient strata and to the ebbing of the sea after the formations of new layers.

A script is not a piece of literature, it’s a process.

So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

Education has for its object the formation of character.