One accumulates or one gets accumulated.

If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.

The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.

It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

Veblen once asked a religious student the value of her church in kegs of beer.

We may make progress only by freeing ourselves from the rut of the past, but without this rut an orderly society would hardly be possible in the first place.

To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort , dignity , and personal advance is only a myth , or worse, a bitter mockery.

If one could divine the nature of the economic forces in the world, one could foretell the future.

Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.

All pain is the same.

We fight ceaselessly to live or we live joyfully to fight.

The object of your desire is not an object.

I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.

What works for the person you're imitating may not work for you.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

The whole world is an open, free market. No state can exist without the others.

I am the slave of those who hunger and thirst after me and treat everything else as unimportant.

In the midst of the shopping and the wrapping and the arranging of presents under your tree this Christmas, may you not forget the gifts you cannot yet hold in your hands.

You know, real life doesn't just suddenly resolve itself. You have to keep working at it.