Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn't just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations - it's also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and running.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again.

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

In the old days, when you took out a mortgage, it was probably through a local bank or a credit union, and whoever gave you your loan held on to it for life. If you lost your job or got too sick to work and suddenly had trouble making your payments, you could call a human being and work things out.

The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.

I have learned to keep to myself how exceptional I am.

If the world would apologize, I might consider a reconciliation.

Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

An omnipotent God is the only being with no reason to lie.

Talk about yourself as much as you like, but do not expect others to listen.

Listening to people keeps them entertained.

Children use all their wiles to get their way with adults. Adults do the same with children.

Fulfillment is often more trouble than it is worth.

A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places.

Well-behaved: he always speaks as if his mother might be listening.

Logic teaches rules for presentation, not thinking.

While we are reading, we are all Don Quixote.