If the search is for examples that contradict the predictions of standard economic models, a good rule of thumb is to start in France.

The most glaring deficiency in traditional economic models is that they completely ignore the role of context in evaluation.

Life is graded on the curve. It's not how big you are, how strong you are, how smart you are. It's how good you are at the things that count relative to the people around you.

No society has ever succeeded without a decent government.

If government is inevitable, the challenge is to come up with the most effective one possible.

Pass down values every day through your actions, your words and your time with your kids.

In short both the things we feel we need and the things available for us to buy depend largely—beyond some point, almost entirely—on the things that others choose to buy.

The most common mistake we make as teachers is attempting to tell our students too much.

As economists have long noted, the puzzle is not that so few people vote, it's that so many do. After all, no individual's vote has ever tipped the balance in a presidential election.

When people bump up against one another in the course of pursuing their goals, it is in everyone's interest to resolve any resulting problems in the least costly ways possible.

The link between rational individual behavior and collectively desirable outcomes is extremely tenuous.

Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

We transported eight giraffes, and there are now nine because one gave birth to a male shortly afterwards. They carry their pregnancies very well-they all looked the same.

I'm making records, my fans they can't wait. They write me letters, tell me I'm great.

I don't think we find compassion. I think we become the space that compassion wants to live in.

Ive not cooked Christmas dinner since 1982.

I had an opportunity many, many times to go to the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner. Jerry Buss asked me many times and you know what, looking back that was stupid of me not going there.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.

What's so interesting about the internet - I keep saying this - is the web has gotten worse over the last five years as opposed to better.