All Quotes

"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."

"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."

"Because individuals have more standing in the culture than organizations, they regularly get credit for achievement that belongs, in fact, to organization."

"Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization."

"A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there."

"How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done."

"I was a young man with unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything, and to my astonishment, the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them."

"After a time the minute colourless particles which are imbedded in the flowing protoplasm are drawn towards and unite with the aggregated masses; so that the protoplasm on the walls being now rendered quite transparent is no longer visible, though some is still present, and still flows, as may be inferred from the occasional transport of particles in the cell-sap."

"I love fools' experiments. I am always making them."

"I often find myself going back to Darwin's saying about the duration of a man's friendships being one of the best measures of his worth."

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change."

"A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus."

"In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment."

"Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa - rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail!"

"There may be more truth in the adventurous pangenesis of Darwin — whom Tyndall calls a "soaring speculator" — than in the cautious, line-bound hypothesis of the latter; who, in common with other thinkers of his class, surrounds his imagination "by the firm frontiers of reason." The theory of a microscopic germ which contains in itself "a world of minor germs," soars in one sense at least into the infinite. It oversteps the world of matter and begins unconsciously busying itself in the world of spirit. If we accept Darwin's theory of the development of species, we find that his starting point is placed in front of an open door. We are at liberty with him, to either remain within, or cross the threshold, beyond which lies the limitless and the incomprehensible, or rather the Unutterable."

"Trained in a less severe school than that of geometry and physics, his reasonings are almost always loose and inconclusive. His generalizations seem to have been reached before he had obtained the materials upon which he rests them: His facts, though frequently new and interesting, are often little more than conjectures; and the grand phenomena of the world of life, […] instinct, and reason, which other minds have woven into noble and elevating truths, have thus become in Mr. Darwin's hands the basis of a dangerous and degrading speculation."

"As an example of the process of natural selection, Mr. Darwin tells us that "in North America, the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely- opened mouth, thus catching, almost like a whale, insects in the water;" and he adds, "even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better-adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered by natural selection more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale"!"

"The two subjects which moved my father perhaps more deeply than any others were cruelty to animals and slavery. His detestation of both was intense, and his indignation was overpowering in case of any levity or want of feeling on these matters."

"Charles Darwin had a big idea, arguably the most powerful idea ever. And like all the best ideas it is beguilingly simple."