The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.
