“Russia was under the impression that the neoliberal advisors were going to make Russia as rich as the United States. What they really did was create a kleptocracy that was virtually tax-free.”

To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem.

Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.

I don’t want to be able to see the audience

You get a constituency; you make them believe your promises, and then you turn them over to your financial campaign backers. That’s what politics has become and that’s as much an art of deception as economics is.

One of the big problems in America’s economic polarization and shrinkage is that pensions can’t be paid. So there are going to be defaults on pensions here, just like Europeans are insisting in rolling back pensions. You can look at Greece and Argentina as the future of America.

True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you.

I’ve forbidden my daughter to have grandchildren, I’m too young.

Money is not a factor of production. But in order to have access to credit, in order to get money, in order to get an education, you have to pay the banks.

Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, “Listen Godzilla, you don’t have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine”.

These $100 bills aren’t meant to circulate. They’re not to spend on goods and services. They’re a store of value. They’re a form of saving.

I don’t aim to offend.

On the flat tax, the more you compress the tax rates, the more you untax where the income is really made, at the top of the pyramid.

Emotional stability and expression comes from women.

If you look at payments to labor as a proportion of national income or gross domestic product, you find profits going way up, investment and savings going up.

When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that “real wealth.” It exposes what’s wrong in the mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage is in the textbooks is not scientific.

A science is not mere knowledge, it is knowledge which has undergone a process of intellectual digestion. It is the grasp of many things brought together in one, and hence is its power; for, properly speaking, it is Science that is power, not Knowledge.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays; though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before.

Are you so afraid that you are willing to trade your freedom for security?

What a strange world. We trade our days for things.

When you cook under pressure you trade perfection.

Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn’t trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity.

In developing countries, lack of infrastructure is a far more serious barrier to trade than tariffs.