All Quotes

"When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?"

"You can't push on a string."

"Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others."

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

"My only regret is that I have not drunk more champagne in my life."

"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."

"We will not have any more crashes in our time."

"It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong."

"His [Keynes's] own leisure was admirably as it was variously employed: in inspecting his pigs; in attending a sale of pictures; in perusing (unlike some bibliophiles) a minor Elizabethan poet, his latest acquisition; in listening to a piano recital, recumbent in a box of the theatre he had built; in gossip and good talk and a glass of wine. ‘My only regret’, he said at the close of a College feast, ‘is that I have not drunk more champagne in my life.’ And so it was that he knew what leisure could give and desired that all should share the gift."

"Following the financial crisis of September 2008 when the American investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, threatening to engulf the entire banking system, the British economist John Maynard Keynes returned to center stage. In the popular press and in the writings of many economists, Keynes featured prominently as governments around the world urgently sought ways to avoid economic collapse."

"Keynes was a man of prodigious intellectual gifts, who straddled the worlds of banking, politics, the City, journalism and the arts, playing a significant role in all of them. But that doesn't express the nub of his attitude to the world and to human behaviour. What I admire is his belief in the moral responsibility of society towards its members, an attitude he brought to bear on his economic theories."

"In 1920, regrets and apprehensions about the treaty's alleged severity found expression in a book which was to exercise an immense and far-reaching influence; indeed eventually largely to determine the British governing classes' view of the treaty, and of the treatment of Germany under its provisions. The book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was written by J. M. Keynes, an economist of genius, but also very much a precious intellectual typical of the period...a nonconformist by upbringing, a conscientious objector during the war, a liberal, a man of spinsterish personality... The Economic Consequences of the Peace was, except when dealing specifically with economics, simply a moral tract, hot with emotion, which took no account of strategy or the balance of power. Its central argument that the Versailles Treaty was a Carthaginian peace was itself sentimental nonsense, for, in the first place, the treaty was, as the French feared at the time, not Carthaginian enough adequately to reduce German power; secondly, it was extremely lenient in comparison with the peace terms which Germany herself, when she was expecting to win the war, had had in mind to impose on the Allies; and thirdly it was hardly more than a tap on the wrist compared with the peace Germany did in fact impose on Russia at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918... However, it was in the very shortcomings of Keynes's book – its sentimentality, its moral indignation, its sense of guilt, its lack of strategic comprehension – that lay its particular appeal and guaranteed its immense, far-reaching and catastrophic success... For by the early 1930s the Keynesian view of the Versailles Treaty had become to seem the only one an educated, intelligent, liberal-minded man could possibly hold."

"After careful research along these lines, I came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s. Previously, I had thought the opposite. But facts were facts and there was no denying my conclusion. It didn’t affect the argument in my book, which was only about the rise and fall of ideas. The fact that Keynesian ideas were correct as well as popular simply made my thesis stronger."

"I think it is pretty hard to explain most governments’ responses to the crisis and recession without a healthy dose of Keynes."

"Keynes was no revolutionary, but his ideas revolutionized 20th-century economics."

"With all his beguiling power of expression and great, but disorderly force of intellect, Keynes will be best remembered as the man who made inflation respectable."

"Without Keynes, government budgets would have become unbalanced, as they did before Keynes, during periods of depression and war. Without Keynes, governments would have varied the rate of money creation over time and place, with bad and good consequences. Without Keynes, World War II would have happened, and the economies of Western democracies would have been pulled out of the lingering stagnation of the 1930s. Without Keynes, substantially full employment and an accompanying inflationary threat would have described the postwar years. But these events of history would have been conceived and described differently, then and now, without the towering Keynesian presence. Without Keynes, the proclivities of ordinary politicians would have been held in check more adequately in the 1960s and 1970s. Without Keynes, modern budgets would not be quite so bloated, with the threat of more to come, and inflation would not be the clear and present danger to the free society that it has surely now become. The legacy or heritage of Lord Keynes is the putative intellectual legitimacy provided to the natural and predictable political biases toward deficit spending, inflation, and the growth of government."

"Off-Off-Broadway is absolutely necessary. It doesn't have to be sanctioned by the state, subsidized or anything. The plank and the passion is what it's about."

"You need friends, especially in the theatre, you need friends. You need people to interchange with, interface with, connect with. Together you’re going to make it, you’re going to do it together, you’re going to put it on, whatever it is."

"The greatest theatre that I experienced in my life was The Living Theatre and they were Off-Off-Broadway. And that was in the fifties."

"[Insomnia]’s a film that I look back on with great fondness. Working with Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank was an incredible experience. Sometimes, when people look for connections in your work, they look more at things like budget level than at the filmmaking itself. If you compare it to Oppenheimer, for example, there’s a similar attempt to try and convey the subjective experience of the protagonist. In the case of Pacino’s character, he’s suffering from a distortion of perception due to lack of sleep, and it’s not a million miles away from what I’m trying to do with showing Oppenheimer’s internal process, particularly at the beginning of the film."

"There have even been outright bad writers blessed by the visitation of a poetic title. Ayn Rand had one with The Fountainhead, and another with Atlas Shrugged: a bit of a mouthful... Yet if those were not two of the worst books ever written - the worst books ever written don't even get published - they were certainly among the worst books ever to be taken seriously."

"I never made it through either of Rand’s two big novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. To enjoy either, I suspect, you had to have encountered Rand in adolescence, when so many of life’s lasting enthusiasms are forged. In recent years, a few friends have urged Rand on me, and I dutifully tried both novels more than once. Each time, I found myself oscillating between fits of the giggles, at the awful prose, and irritation, at the jejune philosophy."

"Like her other works of fiction and nonfiction, the book Atlas Shrugged manages to be both deeply sinister and deeply ridiculous, which isn’t so easy to do. Today there is a very small minority of economists who take her ideas seriously. There are virtually no biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, ethologists, geneticists or evolutionary theorists who do. Her ideas about the individual simply do not fit the objective research about how our species behaves and prospers."

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

"(T)he idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else."

"O people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you."

"In the space of seven years I have succeeded in accomplishing a great work and uniting the whole world in one Empire."

"If one must drink, then let one drink thrice a month, for more is bad. If one gets drunk twice a month, it is better; if one gets drunk once a month, that is better still; and if one doesn't drink at all, that is the best of all."

"My children, I am nearing the end of my life. With the help of Tengri, I leave you such an empire that it is a year's walking distance from its center to its tip. If you want to preserve it, stay united, act together against your enemies, agree to increase the wealth of those who are loyal to you. One of you must sit on the throne. Ögedei will be my successor. Respect this choice after my death."

"Our sons and grandchildren will wear silk clothes, eat delicious and fatty food, ride excellent war horses, hold the most beautiful women and the most charming young girls in their arms, and they will not remember that all of this happened thanks to us."

"God is everywhere, and you can find him everywhere."

"The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms."

"[What, in all the world, could bring the greatest happiness?]"

"[Militarily] ... he was the equal of Alexander the Great or Napoleon I."

"Genghis Khan is infamous as a merciless and bloodthirsty conqueror - outside Mongolia, where he is a national hero. One of the greatest organizers in history, he forged mutually hostile and disunited tribes into a Mongolian nation that extended its power over an unprecedentedly vast Empire. He patronized learning and founded dynasties that dominated Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Near East for centuries after his death. Although he slaughtered huge numbers of his enemies, he brought peace to lands he ruled and prosperity to his homeland."

"The one name which Muslims hate and fear most is that of Chengiz Khan. He is a spectre which has haunted Muslim historians for centuries. He swept like a tornado over the then most powerful and extensive Islamic empire of Khwarazm. In a short span of five years (1219-1224 CE), he slaughtered millions of Muslims, forced many others including women and children into slavery, and razed to the ground quite a few of the most populous and prosperous cities of the Muslim world at that time. [...] The logic which declares Tengiri to be a satan and denounces Chengiz Khan as an archcriminal but which, in the same breath, proclaims Allah as divine and hails the Ghaznavis, Ghuris, Timurs and Baburs as heroes, is, to the say the least, worse than casuistry..."

"Possessed of great energy, discernment, genius and understanding."

"Thuswise Chingiz Khan made a nation out of dust."

"Although time was running out for horse-borne warriors, they remained formidable in the right circumstances. In the thirteenth century Genghis Khan welded quarrelling Mongol tribes together into a highly centralised state which proved, for a time, to be an unstoppable military force, sweeping away regimes in China and Persia. Mongol warriors were highly mobile and, when they were challenged by forces from more settled empires, withdrew into the vast spaces of Central Asia. One of the secrets of their success may have been another simple piece of technology like the stirrup. Mongol warriors wore silk undershirts, so that if they were hit by an arrow the silk wrapped around its head. It was not only easier to get the arrow out; the risk of infection, until the modern age a greater killer of soldiers than death in battle, was much less. Under Genghis’s successors his warriors stormed westwards through Central Asia and Russia to the shores of the Black Sea, carrying all before them and leaving a trail of death and ruin. No force could stand against them and by 1241 they were probing into Hungary, Poland and present-day Romania and Austria. It looked as though much of what was a weak and divided Europe would become part of their empire – and think what a different history it would have had – when the Mongols suddenly stopped and withdrew in 1242. It may be because word had come that, thousands of miles to the east, the Great Khan had died, but historians have recently speculated that poor weather had turned the ground marshy and ruined the fodder for the Mongol horses."

"The key word for me on him is "inspiration." He is a leader by inspiration. He sets an example. It's quite important that people realize that I don't see him as a glad-handing show-off, a one-man vigilante force who rights every wrong. Basically, he's a pacifist, a man who comes along and says, 'What can I do to help?' He stands on the sidelines until there is real trouble. He does not want to get involved unless it's absolutely necessary because he thinks people should learn to make their own decisions."

"Somewhere in Time, while it errs on the side of pretentiousness, is an absolutely honest attempt to create an old-fashioned romance. It's based on love rather than on sex or X-rated bedroom scenes. I don't know how to talk about a love story without getting all gooey about it, but the script excited me because of the situation of the leading character... His problem struck me as that of many people. They've got everything going for them, or so they say, except for a real commitment, a real love."

"Superman is nothing more than a popular retelling of the Christ story, or Greek mythology. It's an archetype, watered down and made in vivid colors for twelve-year-old's mentality. It's pop mythology, which extends to the actor, then seeps over to a demand that that actor reflect the needs of the worshipers. The worship doesn't only go on in the temples — it goes on in the streets, and restaurants, in magazines. But, you know, I'm from New Jersey, I'm not from Olympus or Krypton, so back off 'cause I can't take the responsibility."

"So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable."

"I'm starting a new chapter in my life, and you have no idea how much that means."

"We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them."

"When the first Superman movie came out, I gave dozens of interviews to promote it. The most frequent question was: What is a hero? My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous action without considering the consequences. Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them."

"What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely."

"In 1984, the government spent zero dollars on AIDS research, because AIDS was thought to be a death sentence, and the virus was far too complicated to deal with. Today, the government spends annually $1.8 billion a year on research, and people who would have been dead four or five years ago now have the virus virtually undetectable in their bloodstream, and they're living normal lives. That was something thought impossible until we put money and talent together and aimed it toward a problem."

""Neglect - even misstatement - of recent scientific data was also evident in last year's testimony before this subcommittee by the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation. Mr. Reeve, on behalf of the Foundation, testified that adult stem cells are no substitute for embryonic cells because they cannot be "pluripotent" but are confined to a narrow range of specialization. Yet a few weeks after that hearing, researchers funded by the NIH and the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation published a study indicating that adult bone marrow stem cells "may constitute an abundant and accessible cellular reservoir for the treatment of a variety of neurologic diseases." The first sentence of the published study states: "Pluripotent stem cells have been detected in multiple tissues in the adult, participating in normal replacement and repair, while undergoing self-renewal. The authors cite eleven other studies in support of this observation. Their article, prepared under the aegis of Mr. Reeve's foundation, was received for publication in March 2000, before Mr. Reeve testified in April that adult stem cells cannot be pluripotent."