“By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

The key to selecting the winner isn’t choosing the face you think is the most beautiful but rather the face other people will pick

Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed.

To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol – a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure in heart and cheerful of spirit.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

By this means (fractional reserve banking) government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case.

The Economic Problem, the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.

It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you’re found out quickly.

The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts which we can assume to be known more or less for certain, and partly future events which can only be forecasted with more or less confidence.

Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?

The destruction of the inducement to invest by an excessive liquidity-preference was the outstanding evil, the prime impediment to the growth of wealth, in the ancient and medieval worlds.

It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.

Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.

It’s not bringing in the new ideas that’s so hard; it’s getting rid of the old ones.

Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel – these are things which should in their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible and above all let finance be primarily national.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.

Of all the treasures a state can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.

I have dual citizenship.

…International education cannot be the work of one country. It is the responsibility and promise of all nations. It calls for free exchange and full collaboration…The knowledge of our citizens is one treasure which grows only when it is shared.

Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.

Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, ‘His color is not mine,’ or ‘His beliefs are strange and different,’ in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.

Citizenship consists in the service of the country.