“I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences… essential to that institution’s ability to function effectively and achieve its mandated objectives.”

Speaking as somebody who has been happily married for 35 years, I can’t imagine any choice more consequential for a lifelong journey than the choice of a traveling companion.

Weaker currencies abroad mean a strong dollar, and a stronger dollar, together with a weak global environment, is a drag on the U.S. econom.

If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.

If your uniform isn’t dirty, you haven’t been in the game.

Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

I am confident that we will meet whatever challenges the future may bring.

The crisis in Europe has affected the US economy by acting as a drag on our exports, weighing on business and consumer confidence and pressuring US financial markets and institutions.

The central bank needs to be able to make policy without short term political concerns.

A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous ‘helicopter drop’ of money.

The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have – great universities. We have entrepreneurs.

The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.

The more important reason is that the research itself provides an important long-run perspective on the issues that we face on a day-to-day basis.

I come from Main Street, from a small town that’s really depressed.

Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective.

I don’t see much evidence of an equity bubble.

Education – lifelong education for everyone – from toddlers to workers well advanced in their careers – is indeed an excellent investment for individuals and society as a whole.

We face an essential need to reach a definition of terrorism that will enjoy wide international agreement, thus enabling international operations against terrorist organizations.

History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it.

There is nothing more guaranteed to reduce a man to the essentials than to live beneath the sky.

The essential thing is to run period! And to do it for a long time and consistently and then everything will take care of itself.

For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials.

To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose.

The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left’s on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.