"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage."

""Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace."

"Private enterprise did not get us atomic energy."

"Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat."

"No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food."

"In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole."

"The inevitable counterpart of specialization is organization. This is what brings the work of specialists to a coherent result. If there are many specialists, this coordination will be a major task. So complex, indeed, will be the job of organizing specialists that there will be specialists on organization and organizations of specialists on organization. More perhaps than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestation of advanced technology."

"By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man."

"Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings."

"The individual serves the planning system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it far more by consuming its products. On no other activity, religious, political or moral, is he so elaborately, skillfully and expensively instructed."

"In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians."

"We may lay it down as a rule that the older the exercise of any power, the more benign it will appear, and the more recent its assumption, the more unnatural and even dangerous it will seem."

"The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable."

"There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure."

"The size of General Motors is in the service not of monopoly or the economies of scale but of planning."

"Nothing so effectively economizes effort and intelligence, as distinct from anxiety, as the knowledge that nothing can be done."