“Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.”

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.

It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.

We will not have any more crashes in our time.

Chess is a cure for headaches.

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.

The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.

Whenever you save five shillings you put a man out of work for a day.

A speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.

It is the long-term investor, who will in practice come in for the most criticism… For it is the essence of his behavior that he should be eccentric, unconventional, and rash in the eyes of average opinion.

Investment based on genuine long-term expectations is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable.

Perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

And amongst the lower strata in Iranian society, we are witnessing an increasing rise of the expectation and it’s clear that the regime is incapable of satisfying these demands.

The number of the opposition has certainly increased [in Iran].

You should settle the issue right there. One who runs away from suffering out of fear is the most foolish person of all. He will simply increases his stupidity endlessly.

We practice to learn how to let go, not how to increase our holding on to things. Enlightenment appears when you stop wanting anything.

George W. Bush and Tony Blair made the promise that they would not tolerate failed states because they could become a haven for terrorists. And today? The number increases.

Thus any increase of outward splendor is usually a sign of a decrease in inward illumination

That vie with one another (“qui rivalisent à l’envi,” Fr.), by the increase of their armies and the improvement of their engines of murder (“engins meurtriers”, Fr).

Light refused increases darkness.