"The entire thrust of neoclassical thought is to argue that the free market economy is an efficient system that will optimize utility for all mankind, if only government will get out of the way. It therefore departs from classical economists such as Adam Smith, who recognized the importance of governments for regulating markets and preventing monopolies."

"To balance the economy, we need first to balance our priorities, and abandon rigid ideologies."

"The real reason for the longevity of the neoclassical model have less to do with science, and more to do with the social dynamics of the universities that propagate it, and its appeal to a particular mindset."

"The idea that money begets money, and that the rich and powerful enjoy unfair advantages, goes against what we are taught - or like to believe - about the capitalist system."

"The neoclassical dogma of diminishing returns is completely wrong - success begets success and wealth begets wealth."

"It can be annoying to find out the name of a famous local landmark has no significance other than belonging to some distant relation or drinking buddy of the explorer."

"The economy is a nonlinear fractal system, where the smallest scales are linked to the largest, and the decisions of the central bank are affected by the gut instincts of the people on the street."

"The economy is crooked not straight; and mainstream economists are like flat-earthers who keep saying the world is flat despite all the evidence to the contrary."

"Orthodox tools based on a normal distribution therefore fail exactly where they are most needed, at the extremes."

"To build a genuinely sustainable economy, we need to recognize and embrace the dynamic nature of the world, and free ourselves from the dead holds of static dogma."

"It has become increasingly evident, at least among those who aren't currency traders or true believers in the optimality of free markets, that it would be nice if this system could calm down a touch. One option is the Tobin tax, which would impose a tax of around 0.1 percent on currency trades, and act as a kind of damper on speculation."

"The market can quickly seize up. Prices don't adjust in a smooth continuous fashion, but instead abruptly reconfigure themselves, like the earth's crust during an earthquake."

"The strength of capitalism does not lie in the neoclassical idea of stability, but in its ability to unleash this creative energy. like a chaotic mathematical system, it is capable of producing surprise."

"Economists often talk about the benefits of choice, but rational economic man doesn't actually have much freedom to chose, because he is a slave to his own preferences."

"Not only is Homo economicus self-centered, he is a murdering psychopath. However, as with much of neoclassical economic thought, there is an element of circularity here."

"Adam Smith's invisible hand does exist, but as an emergent property of a complex system. It has a fuzzy tendency to reduce big price discrepancies, but it acts in a rather haphazard way."

"Perfect order is boring, perfect randomness is boring, but complex systems are interesting."

"The race to the moon was never really about the moon - its utility didn't rest in samples of moon rock. It was about capitalism versus communism, right versus left."

"Money, having freed itself from the physical universe, has become number itself, and finance a strange form of mathematical alchemy."

"For even money itself has no value if there is no network of people to recognize it."

"If the aim of economics is really to provide the greatest happiness to the most people, than it is rather shocking to discover that economic growth has no net effect on happiness. So what has gone wrong with the neoclassical prospect?"

"A society in which each person is hell bent on maximizing his or her own utility, may therefore have declining overall utility."

"There is something intrinsically upside down and counter-intuitive in the relationship between money and happiness."

"Mathematics was not just about keeping track of were the moon was going, but also where the money was going."

"The invisible hand is an emergent property of this system, which never reaches an optimal equilibrium, but instead is fundamentally dynamic and unstable, with complex effects on society."

"Advanced technology is great at tasks such as keeping an airliner flying several thousand feet in the air, but is easily crippled by social complications."

"Strauss’ whole study indicates that noble nature as Nietzsche presents it—no, embodies it—replaces divine nature as Plato presents it."

"How can historicism consistently exempt itself from its own verdict that all human thought is historical?"

"Nietzsche’s arrival in modern philosophy signaled an unprecedented necessity: “probity”, “intellectual conscience”, Enlightenment radicalized by a new bravery that scorns any comforts like God."

"Nietzsche discovered the clue to esotericism early … “The fact of the pious fraud.”"

"The way of Socrates had shown itself to be a limited way because it concerned itself “only with the scientific investigation of justice and the virtues,” and it had shown itself to be an intransigent way because it chose “non-conformity and death.” Plato corrected the way of Socrates—he removed the limitation and tempered its intransigence."

"Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible."

"As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope."

"As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier."

"It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth."

"The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more."

"I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing themselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could bare lines into living reality, I was all powerful. I could read."

"Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past."

"I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia."

"The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users."

"Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being."

"Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion."

"From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis."

"To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft."

"One can transform a place by reading in it."

"Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen."

"In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form."

"At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book's definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape."

"Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation."

"Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters."