Great Throughts Treasury

"Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence."

"Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths."

"There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth."

"It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure."

"With the American failure came world failure."

"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed."

"Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived."

"Foresight is an imperfect thing - all prevision in economics is imperfect."