People From New Haven

"Schiff likes to say he 'predicted' the financial collapse, but with ludicrous theories like these, we're predicting that he'll never be a U.S. Senator."

"Existing regulators had all the powers they needed, and more, and they failed miserably to foresee and prevent this crisis. Chris Dodd is now asking us to put all our eggs in one basket and trust a "super regulatory agency." He should know better than to centralize power in the hands of Washington bureaucrats - it's precisely the arrangement that caused our current problems. I think most Connecticut voters know that we need fewer czars in Washington, not more. As long as Fannie and Freddie and Congress are meddling with the economy, changing the structure of the regulators is basically rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."

"The process of dumbing people down so they’ll buy official figures showing inflation “under control” at levels of 1 to 2 percent or so (when it is actually more like 8 to 9 percent) is actually a fairly recent development."

"Stocks that are selected conservatively and pay high cash dividends [higher than bonds] are, in fact, my favorite investment alternative, especially where there is the prospect of currency profits...."

"Real economic growth emanates from increased productivity, which tends to hold prices down."

"Transferring regulatory authority from one unaccountable agency to another will not solve any problems."

"Here’s why I would recommend against [selling the U.S. stock markets short]....Retail brokers normally require investors to hold any short-sale proceeds in U.S. dollars, usually earning no interest. The dollar, seen through my famously jaundiced eye, could lose more purchasing power than the security you sold short lost value....I’ve got a much better idea, which is to borrow dollars and spend them to acquire foreign income-producing assets, using the income to pay the interest."

"If you think mutual funds aren’t a flagrant enough example of conflict of interest, try hedge funds."

"[Consumer credit] is like giving yourself a blood transfusion from your left arm to your right. Nothing is accomplished, except the possibility of spilling blood on the floor. But it's not even that benign."

"Mutual funds are an overrated investment heavily promoted by Wall Street."

"I'm interrupting my career. It's not like I want my new career in politics. But I'm willing to interrupt it the same way that somebody interrupted their career and joined World War II and went off to fight the Nazis. I don't think that I'm that heroic, and I don't think I'm risking as much as a soldier. But it's the same principle."

"What America has succeeded in creating is not an economy impervious to shocks, but merely one which enables their consequences to be postponed to a later date."

"There are no checks and balances if the gov is wrong, if a private entrepreneur makes a mistake, he goes bankrupt, the losses are cut, if he bets wrong, he loses, if the gov bets wrong, they just get bigger, they just appropriate more money, it's a bottomless pit, because they either get it from the tax payers or run it off a printing press."

"In the perspective of previous bear markets, notably those of the 1930s and the 1970s, the prospects look even worse. Economic conditions now are as bad as or worse than what existed then."

"Nobody is entitled to someone else's money, that is the bottom line. People think they are entitled to it because they think they paid into it, nobody paid into anything, it was a fraud. Every single dollar that the gov collected in social security taxes, has already been spent, there is nothing there, there is no money, so the only money the government gets to make current payment is the money it can take from people who are still working. Its a transfer from the working poor in many cases to the retired rich. We don't have the money, I feel bad for the fact people made promises we can't keep, I feel bad for the people that invested with Bernie Madoff and lost their money, but its the same principle, its the same Ponzi scheme. We have to put an end to it, we have to find real solution to these problems because if we keep on denying that they exist and keep on spending money, we're going to destroy the value of everyone's benefits."

"Non-dividend-paying growth stocks can be attractive but should be viewed as speculation rather than investing."

"Inflation is the unhappy result of our monetary mismanagement and the ultimate cause of the coming economic collapse."

"Legitimate economic expansions, financed by actual savings, do not need busts. It is only the inflation-induced varieties that sow the seeds of their own destruction."

"The real bubble in China is in US Treasuries, in US dollars."

"Paying attention to the CPI and the others is like leaving your house on a rainy day without carrying an umbrella because a government weather report told you it was sunny."

"I'm not saying it wasn't a crime. I just saying it's not pedophilia. When I was in college I had sex with under age girls. That doesn't make me a pedophile."

"... a comparison of the American regard for inventive skill as opposed to skill in pure science. Our greatest inventive genius, Thomas A. Edison, was all but canonized by the American public, and a legend has been built around him. One cannot, I suppose, expect that achievements in pure science would receive the same public applause that came to inventions as spectacular and as directly influential on ordinary life as Edison’s. But one might have expected that our greatest genius in pure science, Josiah Willard Gibbs, who laid the theoretical foundations for modern physical chemistry, would have been a figure of some comparable acclaim among the educated public. Yet Gibbs, whose work was celebrated in Europe, lived out his life in public and even professional obscurity at Yale, where he taught for thirty-two years. Yale, which led American universities in its scientific achievements during the nineteenth century, was unable in those thirty-two years to provide him with more than a half dozen or so graduate students who could understand his work, and never took the trouble to award him an honorary degree."

"[Gibbs' 1878] paper stands today as one of the most profound contributions to the world of human thought and […] places him with the greatest of the world's geniuses."

"... the magnificent structure of Gibbsian statistical mechanics [cannot] be viewed as founded upon ideal classical gases, Boltzmannian kinetic theory, and the virial and cluster expansions for dilute fluids! True, this last route was still frequently retravelled in textbooks more than 50 years after Gibbs’ major works were published; but it deeply misrepresents the power and range of statistical mechanics... asking ‘‘What does statistical mechanics convey to a physicist?’’ and replying: ‘‘It means that one can compute the second-virial coefficient to correct the ideal gas laws!’’ Of course, historically, that is not a totally irrelevant remark; but it is extremely misleading and, in effect, insults one of America’s greatest theoretical physicists, Josiah Willard Gibbs."

"...only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead."

"Willard Gibbs is the type of the imagination at work in the world. His story is that of an opening up which has had its effect on our lives and our thinking; and, it seems to me, it is the emblem of the naked imagination —which is called abstract and impractical, but whose discoveries can be used by anyone who is interested, in whatever "field"— an imagination which for me, more than that of any other figure in American thought, any poet, or political, or religious figure, stands for imagination at its essential points."

"Maxwell, and then Boltzmann, and then... J. Willard Gibbs... expended enormous intellectual effort in devising... , or... . The uses... extend far beyond gases... describing electric and magnetic interactions, chemical reactions, phase transitions... and all other manner of exchanges of matter and energy. The success... has driven the belief among many physicists that it could be applied with similar success to society. ...[E]verything from the flow of funds in the stock market to the flow of traffic on interstate highways ..."

"On the one hand, the student has been informed by some writers that the only certain way lies in the use of the entropy-function and the thermodynamic potentials; on the other hand, he is told with equal authority that the method used by the original investigators has been the consideration of cyclic processes, and that the former method is nothing but a mathematical (perhaps unnecessary) refinement of the results obtained by the latter. These extreme attitudes appear to me to be unfortunate, and more especially when one observes the physical clearness introduced by the use of cyclic processes, but at the same time remembers that most of the results obtained by separate investigators using cyclic processes had, with a great many more, previously been found by J. Willard Gibbs by means of a purely analytical method."

"In the last generation, this country produced one of the most eminent men of science in the whole world. His name was quite unknown among us while he lived, and it is still unknown. Yet I may say without too great exaggeration that when I heard it mentioned in a professional assembly in the Netherlands two years ago, everybody got down under the table and touched their foreheads to the floor. His name was Josiah Willard Gibbs."

"Let a drop of wine fall into a glass of water; whatever be the law that governs the internal movement of the liquid, we will soon see it tint itself uniformly pink and from that moment on, however we may agitate the vessel, it appears that the wine and water can separate no more. All this, Maxwell and Boltzmann have explained, but the one who saw it in the cleanest way, in a book that is too little read because it is difficult to read, is Gibbs, in his Principles of Statistical Mechanics."

"Many men have had intuitions well ahead of their time; and this is not least true in mathematical physics. Gibbs' introduction of probability into physics occurred well before there was an adequate theory of the sort of probability he needed. But for all these gaps it is, I am convinced, Gibbs rather than Einstein or Heisenberg or Planck to whom we must attribute the first great revolution of twentieth century physics."

"I wish to know systems."

"Anyone having these desires will make these researches."

"A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane."

"Mathematics is a language."

"We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics."

"The whole is simpler than its parts."

"If I have had any success in mathematical physics, it is, I think, because I have been able to dodge mathematical difficulties."

"His true monument lies not on the shelves of libraries, but in the thoughts of men, and in the history of more than one science."

"One of the principal objects of theoretical research is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in the greatest simplicity."

"In all these papers we see a love of honest work, an aversion to shams, a caution in the enunciation of conclusions, a distrust of rash generalizations and speculations based on uncertain premises. He was never anxious to add one more guess on doubtful matters in the hope of hitting the truth, or what might pass as such for a time, but was always ready to take infinite pains in the most careful testing of every theory. With these qualities was united a modesty which forbade the pushing of his own claims and desired no reputation except the unsought tribute of competent judges."

"The laws of thermodynamics, as empirically determined, express the approximate and probable behavior of systems of a great number of particles, or, more precisely, they express the laws of mechanics for such systems as they appear to beings who have not the fineness of perception to enable them to appreciate quantities of the order of magnitude of those which relate to single particles, and who cannot repeat their experiments often enough to obtain any but the most probable results."

"Unassuming in manner, genial and kindly in his intercourse with his fellow-men, never showing impatience or irritation, devoid of personal ambition of the baser sort or of the slightest desire to exalt himself, he went far toward realizing the ideal of the unselfish, Christian gentleman. In the minds of those who knew him, the greatness of his intellectual achievements will never overshadow the beauty and dignity of his life."

"Through [Pennsylvania Station] one entered the city like a god. Perhaps it was really too much. One scuttles in now like a rat."

"Optics is an example of the different ways a human is able to see things in the world. The same goes for the color of a person's skin and even though optics present that there are differences in color, these do not state that they should necessarily be treated as different."

"The first object of any act of learning, over and beyond the pleasure it may give, is that it should serve us in the future. Learning should not only take us somewhere; it should allow us later to go further more easily."

"Things remain the same because it is impossible to change very much without changing most of everything."

"In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine."

"If the end doesn't justify the means, what does?"

"You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax."