"To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills."

"I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits."

"Chinese productivity is the highest in the world but the way they do it is by borrowing the technology from abroad, either by joint ventures or other means."

"Chinese productivity is the highest in the world but the way they do it is by borrowing the technology from abroad, either by joint ventures or other means."

"An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense... that gold and economic freedom are inseparable."

"Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart."

"Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours."

"If somebody had said to me in June or July of 1987, 'We'd like you to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, but you're never allowed to discuss any economics after you leave,' I'd have said, 'Forget it.' What do they want me to do? Become an anthropologist?'"

"Increased jobs are the consequence of increased trade. Increasing jobs more than output implies a fall in productivity and standards of living. That surely cannot be our goal."

"I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that."

"Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse."

"I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about."

"Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy."

"People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that."

"I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant"

"Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees"

"Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?"

"There is a cop who is both prowler and father: he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers, had certain ideals."

"There is a cop who is both prowler and father: he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers, had certain ideals."

"Who neither touched nor spoke? whose nape, whose finger-ends nervelessly lied the hours away?"

"Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a life It is a presence it has a history a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence"

"The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death. The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot."

"An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim."

"And yet, protest it if we will, Some corner of the mind retains The medieval man, who still Keeps watch upon those starry skeins And drives us out of doors at night To gaze at anagrams of light."