"Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and deceitful through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they are so as a means of attaining popularity and office, and because of the greed for wealth."

"Pride is not the heritage of man; humility should dwell with frailty, and atone for ignorance, error, and imperfection."

"That which causes us trials shall yield us triumph: and that which make our hearts ache shall fill us with gladness. The only true happiness is to learn, to advance, and to improve: which could not happen unless we had commenced with error, ignorance, and imperfection. We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light."

"We are all naturally seekers of wonders. We travel far to see the majesty of old ruins, the venerable forms of the hoary mountains, great waterfalls, and galleries of art. And yet the world's wonder is all around us; the wonder of setting suns, and evening stars, of the magic spring-time, the blossoming of the trees, the strange transformations of the moth.."

"Government regulation cannot substitute for individual integrity."

"We had a bubble in housing."

"The only way to have several currencies from divergent nations lumped together is if they are culturally close, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. If they aren't, it simply can't continue to work."

"If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. -- Speaking to a Senate Committee in 1987, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly, November 4, 2005."

"We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda."

"I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I said."

"Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy."

"I'm not denying that monopolies are terrible things, but I am denying that it is readily easy to resolve them through legislation of that nature."

"There are errors in this book. I do not know where they are. If I did they wouldn't be there. But with close to two hundred thousand words my probabilistic mind tells me some are wrong."

"I've been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I've never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I'm not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it's got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive."

"History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums."

"Fear is a far more dominant force in human behaviour than euphoria - I would never have expected that or given it a moment's thought before, but it shows up in the data in so many ways."

"Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here."

"Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country."

"Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect."

"If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said."

"The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out."

"I get so engaged when I have a problem you cannot solve that I just cannot break away from what I am doing - I keep thinking and thinking and cannot stop."

"Unless you are willing to compromise, society cannot live together."

"Every economy exists, no matter what the level of democracy, has elements of crony capitalism. It's - given human nature and given the democratic structures, which we all, I assume, adhere to, that is an inevitable consequence."