The Wealth of Nations may not be an original book, but it is unquestionably a masterpiece.

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.

It is unclear if corporate governments are truly the dunces of human health or if they are just faking it in order to propagate a biologically toxic agenda on an unsuspecting global population.

The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning.

Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.

I like to stay in a hotel where it's a dome of silence. I can sit in my room and do nothing.

...whatever you're worried about, you're bigger than the worries.

I have a firm conviction that I am immortal until my work is done.

I think enhanced interrogation saved lives.

No one is coming to save you.