“More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.”
“Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.”
“The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.”
“In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.”
“There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.”
“The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.”
“People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.”
“There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.”
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”
“By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.”
“There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.”
“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
“In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.”
“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”
“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.”
“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.”
“Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.”
“Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.”
“The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.”
“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.”
“In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.”
“Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.”
“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
“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.”
“Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.”
“The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.”
“The traveler to the United States will do well to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.”