"In a community wherepublic services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway."

"The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt."

"The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground."

"Very important functions can be performed very wastefully and often are."

"It is in the long run that the corporation lives."

"A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness."

"In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence."

"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."

"One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish."

"We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce."

"More die in the United States of too much food than of too little."

"The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated."

"Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it."

"Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common."

"Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described."

"Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend."

"The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events."

"Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive."

"Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego. It is well no doubt, to reflect on how much one owes to others."

"But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound."

"But there is still a considerable difference between a failure to do enough that is right and a determination to do much that is wrong."

"At best, in such depression times, monetary policy is a feeble reed on which to lean."

"And after they have started the action will always look, as it did to the frightened men in the Federal Reserve Board in February 1929, like a decision in favor of immediate as against ultimate death. As we have seen, the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner."

"The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories."

"Both of these measures were on the side of increasing spendable income, though unfortunately they were largely without effect. The tax reductions were negligible except in the higher income brackets; businessmen who promised to maintain investment and wages, in accordance with a well-understood convention, considered the promise binding only for the period within which it was not financially disadvantageous to do so."

"The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds."

"Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile."

"In accordance with an old but not outworn tradition, it might now be wise for all to conclude that crime, or even misbehavior, is the act of an individual, not the predisposition of a class."

"Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals."

"Our political tradition sets great store by the generalized symbol of evil. This is the wrongdoer whose wrongdoing will be taken by the public to be the secret propensity of a whole community or class."

"However, Hoover had converted the simple business ritual of reassurance into a major instrument of public policy."

"In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading asyndicate that was driving the market down."

"Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action."

"One of the uses of depression is the exposure of what auditors fail to find."

"Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account."

"Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves."

"A banker need not be popular; indeed a good banker in a healthy capitalist society should probably be much disliked. People do not wish to trust their money to a hail-fellow-well-met but to a misanthrope who can say no."

"Despite a flattering supposition to the contrary, people come readily to terms with power. There is little reason to think that the power of the great bankers, while they were assumed to have it, was much resented. But as the ghosts of numerous tyrants, from Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini will testify, people are very hard on those who, having had power, lose it or are destroyed. Then anger at past arrogance is joined with contempt for the present weakness. The victim or his corpse is made to suffer all available indignities."

"We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York."

"The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness."

"There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars."

"People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy."

"The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state."

"We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much."

"One must always have in mind one simple fact — there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor."

"In the first place I identify this ["the equilibrium of poverty"] with primitive agriculture, and two factors have been at work there. One is, of course, population growth. If you were a poor farmer in India, Pakistan, or in much of Africa, you would want as many sons as possible as your social security. They would keep you out of the hot sun and give you some form of subsistence in your old age. So, you have pressure for population growth that is, itself, the result of the extreme economic insecurity. This is something which hasn't been sufficiently emphasized."

"There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth."

"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."

"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."