"Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff."

"We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't."

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value."

"One of the problems with hedge funds is that they are changing so rapidly. If you have the balance sheet that closed business last night, by 11 A.M. this morning, that won't tell you very much about what they're doing."

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.

“The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”

“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself.”

“Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.”

“I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government”

“It is hard to forget that which it is worse than useless to remember.”

“If ever I was sure that someone was coming to help me, I should run like hell.”

“If ever I was sure that someone was coming to help me, I should run like hell.”

“It's circumstantial evidence, like finding a trout in the milk.”

“As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.”

“I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.”

“A man of genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature, which is always everywhere the same.”

“Handling and use by able minds give value to a language, not so much by innovating as by filling it out with more vigorous and varied services, by stretching and bending it.”

“Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener.”

“We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more. [C] ‘Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius’ [Wretched is a mind anxious about the future].”

“Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together.”

“To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.”

“He who fears he will suffer, already suffers because of his fear.”

“Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.”

“I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it.”