"When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic."
"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."
"Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will."
"The Affluent Society (1958) ch. 20, sect. ii There can be no question, however, that prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition. . ."
"One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done."
"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."
"Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks."
"The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor."
"Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers."
"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."
"Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."
"One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know."
"Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next."
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
"Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive."
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
"Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative."
"We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program."
"A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions."
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."
"The Affluent Society (1958) ch. 2, sect. ii 53 In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd."
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
"One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done."
"When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic."