xxxQuotes Quote

http://www.nowandfutures.com/quotes.html#buffett "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."  -- Voltaire "…the United States has experienced high rates of inflation in the past and appears to be running the same type of fiscal policies that engendered hyperinflations in 20 countries over the past century." -- Laurance Kotlikoff, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis "Review", July/Aug 2006 Ex scientia pecuniae libertas. "Out of knowledge of money comes freedom." -- Unknown "The Wheels of Justice turn slowly but exceedingly fine." -- attributed to many, including Sun Tzu and Longfellow "To buy when others are despondently selling and sell when others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest reward." -- Sir John Templeton  "Bull markets are born in pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die of euphoria." -- Sir John Templeton  "It is the long term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for the most criticism, wherever investment funds are managed by committees or boards or banks. For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputations to fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally." -- John Maynard Keynes (attributed) "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." -- John Maynard Keynes  "The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always." -- John Maynard Keynes  “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” -- John Maynard Keynes, 1937 "... a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware." -- John Maynard Keynes  "Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again." -- John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, 1924 "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" -- John Maynard Keynes, also attributed to Winston Churchill "It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens." -- John Maynard Keynes "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth." "...By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract….governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the nineteenth century." -- John Maynard Keynes - The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919. pp. 235-248. "What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his door-step; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice." -— John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, pp. 10 –12 "Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people." -- Garrison Keillor "A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men." -- John Maynard Keynes, "The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse in Money Values", 1931 "... the benefits of a depreciating currency are not restricted to the government. Farmers and debtors and all persons liable to pay fixed money dues share in the advantage. As now in the persons of business men, so also in former ages these classes constituted the active and constructive elements in the economic scheme… The tendency of money to depreciate has been in past times a weighty counterpoise against the cumulative results of compound interest and the inheritance of fortunes. … By this means each generation can disinherit in part its predecessors’ heirs; and the project of founding a perpetual fortune must be disappointed in this way, unless the community with conscious deliberation provides against it in some other way, more equitable and more expedient." -- John Maynard Keynes - Essays In Persuasion "By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls . . . become 'profiteers', who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished not less than the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds . . . all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless." -- John Maynard Keynes, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace", pages 220-223 (1919). "When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight." -- John Maynard Keynes, "The Future", Essays in Persuasion (1931) Ch. 5, JMK, CW, IX, pp.329 - 331, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930); as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy "In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic. All of us, from the Governor of the Bank of England downwards, are now primarily interested in preserving the stability of business, prices, and employment, and are not likely, when the choice is forced on us, deliberately to sacrifice these to outworn dogma, which had its value once, of 3 pounds, 17 shill ings, 10 1/2 pence per ounce. Advocates of the ancient standard do not observe how remote it now is from the spirit and the requirements of the age. A regulated nonmetallic standard has slipped in unnoticed. It exists." -- John Maynard Keynes, 1932, in "A Retrospective on the Classical Gold Standard, 1821-1931" and in Monetary Reform (1924), p. 172 "The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion." -- John Maynard Keynes, First Annual Report of the Arts Council (1945-1946) "If you owe your banker a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe your banker a million pounds, he is at your mercy." -- John Maynard Keynes "The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available,with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation in the United States." -- John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money", Book 4, Chapter 12, Section 6, pg.160 "Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols." -- John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money", Book 5, Chapter 21,Section 3, pg.298 "Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught" -- John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money", Book 6, Chapter 23, Section 2, pg.339 "Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country's advantage at variance with its neighbours' as the international gold(or, formerly, silver) standard." -- John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money", Book 6, Chapter 23, Section 3, pg.349 "[Silvio] Gesell's chiefwork is written in cool and scientific terms, although it is run through by a more passionate and charged devotion to social justice than many think fit for a scholar. I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell then from that of Marx." -- John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money", Book 6, Chapter 23, Section 6, pg.355 "Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others." -- John Maynard Keynes, as quoted in "Isms" (2006) by Gregory Bergman, p.105 "Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget." -- John Maynard Keynes, per Bartlett "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back... soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil." -- John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" "the theory of aggregated production, which is the point of ['The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money'], nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire." -- John Maynard Keynes, in forward of the German edition of "The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money" "There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world." -- John Maynard Keynes "In my opinion it is a grand book ... Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement." ... "What we need therefore, in my opinion, is not a change in our economic programmes, which would only lead in practice to disillusion with the results of your philosophy; but perhaps even the contrary, namely, an enlargement of them. Your greatest danger is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the United States." -- John Maynard Keynes, after reading after reading Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" "I should... conclude rather differently. I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe enough if those carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue. This is in fact already true of some of them. But the curse is that there is also an important section who could be said to want planning not in order to enjoy its fruits but because morally they hold ideas exactly the opposite of yours, and wish to serve not God but the devil." -- John Maynard Keynes, in response to Hayek's criticism of his theory of deficit spending during bad times and payback during good times (Heilbroner, Robert (2000). The Worldly Philosophers, 278–8) "Now there are indications that two technical fallacies may have affected the policy of your administration. The first relates to the part played in recovery by rising prices. Rising prices are to be welcomed because they are usually a symptom of rising output and employment. When more purchasing power is spent, one expects rising output at rising prices. Since there cannot be rising output without rising prices, it is essential to ensure that the recovery shall not be held back by the insufficiency of the supply of money to support the increased monetary turn-over. But there is much less to be said in favour of rising prices, if they are brought about at the expense of rising output. Some debtors may be helped, but the national recovery as a whole will be retarded. Thus rising prices caused by deliberately increasing prime costs or by restricting output have a vastly inferior value to rising prices which are the natural result of an increase in the nation's purchasing power." "I do not mean to impugn the social justice and social expediency of the redistribution of incomes aimed at by N.I.R.A. and by the various schemes for agricultural restriction. The latter, in particular, I should strongly support in principle. But too much emphasis on the remedial value of a higher price-level as an object in itself may lead to serious misapprehension as to the part which prices can play in the technique of recovery. The stimulation of output by increasing aggregate purchasing power is the right way to get prices up; and not the other way round." -- John Maynard Keynes, in a latter to F.D.R. in 1933 "The other set of fallacies, of which I fear the influence, arises out of a crude economic doctrine commonly known as the Quantity Theory of Money. Rising output and rising incomes will suffer a set-back sooner or later if the quantity of money is rigidly fixed. Some people seem to infer from this that output and income can be raised by increasing the quantity of money. But this is like trying to get fat by buying a larger belt. In the United States to-day your belt is plenty big enough for your belly. It is a most misleading thing to stress the quantity of money, which is only a limiting factor, rather than the volume of expenditure, which is the operative factor." -- John Maynard Keynes, in a latter to F.D.R. in 1933 "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." -- Groucho Marx "An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it." -- Mahatma Gandhi "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." -- Mahatma Gandhi "Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position." -- Mohandas Gandhi "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." -- Mahatma Gandhi "When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always." -- Mahatma Gandhi "There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight." -- Joseph Stiglitz, Capitalist Fools, January 2009 "From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time." -- Friedrich Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom" "We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." -- Winston Churchill "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else." -- Winston Churchill "A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject." -- Winston Churchill (British statesman, 1874-1965) "The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but, there it is." -- Winston Churchill "The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see”" -- Winston Churchill "When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber." -- Winston Churchill "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -- Winston Churchill "If you put two economists xin a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions." -- Winston Churchill "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." -- Winston Churchill "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." -- George Santayana "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." -- Winston Churchill "Ponzi’ finance units must increase its outstanding debt in order to meet its financial obligations. A transition occurs over the course of an expansion as increasingly risky positions are validated by the booming economy that renders the built in margins of error superfluous - encouraging adoption of riskier positions. Eventually, either financing costs rise or income comes in below expectations, leading to defaults on payment commitments." -- Hyman Minsky "... over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structuredominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance. Furthermore, if an economy with a sizeable body of speculative financial units is in an inflationary state, and the authorities attempt to exorcise inflation by monetary constraint, then speculative units will become Ponzi units and the net worth of previously Ponzi units will quickly evaporate. Consequently,units with cash flow shortfalls will be forced to try to make position by selling out position. This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values." -- Hyman Minsky "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." -- Napoleon Bonaparte "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."  -- John 8:32 "The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children." -- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938) "Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence." -- Henri-Frederic Amiel >li>"Corporate ethics and compliance may be similar, but their cores are different. From the perspective of corporate social responsibility, we cannot say that there is no need to question a company's actions just because they are not a crime under the law." -- Yanosuke Hirai "... Member Countries shall take necessary action and/or shall establish negotiations, individually or in groups, with the oil companies with a view to adopting ways and means to offset any adverse effects on the per barrel real income of Member Countries resulting from the international monetary developments as of 15th August 1971." -- OPEC, Sept. 1971, in a communiqué sent out after President Nixon severed the dollar’s link to gold "Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." -- Winston Churchill "The problem with quotes you find on the Internet is that it can be hard to verify their authenticity." -- Abraham Lincoln ;-) "Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero." -- Voltaire, 1729 "The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us." -- Voltaire "... it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." -- Voltaire "The only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for men of good will to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."  -- Edmund Burke "A good parson once said that where mystery begins religion ends. Cannot I say, as truly at least, of human laws, that where mystery begins, justice ends?" -- Edmund Burke "It is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true." -- James Branch Cabell "Don’t gamble! Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it ‘till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it."  -- Will Rogers "If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?"  -- Will Rogers "I love a dog, he does nothing for political reasons." -- Will Rogers "There are three types of people in the world: Those who understand Statistics, and everyone else." -- unknown "Inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist." -— George Carlin, comedian & social commentator "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some models are useful." -- George E.P. Box (Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin) "The US dollar is our currency but your problem." -- US Secretary of the Treasury John Connolly, 1971 "Before this century is over, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will probably be over one million versus around 10,000 now. So for the long-term, the outlook is tremendously bullish if you buy stocks blindly to keep for a century." -- John Templeton, 1999 "The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded." -- Charles-Louis De Secondat (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu – Source: The Spirit of the Laws, 1748 "If fear is cultivated it will become stronger, if faith is cultivated it will achieve mastery." -- John Paul Jones "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." -- Neils Bohr "Sir: You quote me [Dec. 31] as saying: 'We are all Keynesians now.' The quotation is correct, but taken out of context. As best I can recall it, the context was: 'In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, nobody is any longer a Keynesian.' The second half is at least as important as the first." -- Milton Friedman, Letter to Time magazine, February 4 1966 "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." -- Gandhi "[Milton Friedman] has always hated the fragmentation and bickering between schools of economics, which has occurred ever since Marx detached himself from the "classical" school of Smith and Ricardo. In 1974, when vacationing at his summer home in Vermont, Friedman spoke informally at a nearby conference about Austrian economics. He bluntly told the audience, 'There is no Austrian economics--only good economics and bad economics'. (Dolan 1976: 4). His point was that any useful concepts coming out of Austrian economics (he specifically had reference to Hayek's contributions) should be incorporated into the body of mainstream economic theory. In 1982, he made the same point at a conference on supply-side economics. 'I am not a supply-side economist. I am not a monetarist economist. I am an economist.' (Friedman 1982: 53)." -- Mark Skousen, The Making of Modern Economics, pg 432 "The biggest threat to advanced economies is that debt will accumulate until the overhang weighs on growth." -- Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly "In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."  -- Eric Hoffer "Ave Atque Vale!" (Hail and Farewell!) -- Ancient Roman saying on the passing of a great commander "It was probably a mistake to allow gold to rise so high." -- Paul Volcker, ex Federal Reserve Chairman in looking back at the rise of gold from $35 to $850 during the 1970s, per "Paul Volcker: The Making of a Financial Legend" by Joseph B. Treaster "That day the U.S. announced that the dollar would be devalued by 10 percent. By switching the yen to a floating exchange rate, the Japanese currency appreciated, and a sufficient realignment in exchange rates was realized. Joint intervention in gold sales to prevent a steep rise in the price of gold, however, was not undertaken. That was a mistake." -- Paul Volcker, "Nikkei Weekly" Nov. 15, 2004 (original incident on February 12, 1973) Additional comment from Paul Volcker in 2012 regarding the above quote: "The quotation you cite is about an event almost 40 years ago. It pertained to the possibility of speculation in the gold market leading to exchange rate instability at a critical point. The U.S. has not, to the best of my knowledge, intervened in the gold market for more than 40 years." Source  Occam's razor is the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select from among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect. -- created by Friar William of Occam "There are five main purposes of central bank cooperation"..."the provision of international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices (especially gold and foreign exchange) in circumstances where this might be thought useful." -- William S. White, head of the monetary and economic department of the Bank for International Settlements in a speech to a BIS conference in Basel, Switzerland, in June 2005 "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (Who will guard the guardians?) -- Juvenal "Absence of proof is not proof of absence." -- Attributed to William Cowper "Significant changes in the growth rate of money supply, even small ones, impact the financial markets first. Then, they impact changes in the real economy, usually in six to nine months, but in a range of three to 18 months. Usually in about two years in the US, they correlate with changes in the rate of inflation or deflation." "The leads are long and variable, though the more inflation a society has experienced, history shows, the shorter the time lead will be between a change in money supply growth and the subsequent change in inflation." -- Milton Friedman "What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money."  -- Henny Youngman "The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust." -- Henry L. Stimson "…those who wish to know in what direction they are going would do well to give their attention not to the politicians but to the philosophers, for what they propound today will be the faith of tomorrow." -- I.M. Bochenski (1902-1995) "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." -- Francis Bacon, “On Studies,” Essays with Annotations (Boston: Lee and Shepar, 1884) 482 "Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt." -- Roger Bacon (c.1214-1292) "If you keep on gouging and devouring each other, watch out, you will be destroyed by each other. " -- Gal 5:13 "Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted." -- Alan Greenspan, May 20, 1999  "a rule against fraud is not an essential or ... an important ingredient of securities markets" (Easterbrook & Fischel 1991)" -- Alan Greenspan (prior Chairman of the Federal Reserve US Central Bank) "I have one other issue I'd like to throw on the table. I hesitate to do it, but let me tell you some of the issues that are involved here. If we are dealing with psychology, then the thermometers one uses to measure it have an effect. I was raising the question on the side with Governor Mullins of what would happen if the Treasury sold a little gold in this market. There's an interesting question here because if the gold price broke in that context, the thermometer would not be just a measuring tool. It would basically affect the underlying psychology." -- Alan Greenspan, May 18, 1993 ( Page 42 )  "Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud." -- Alan Greenspan, 1999, during a private lunch at the Fed with Brooksley Born (then head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) "Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency...and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry. It’s not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating." -– Alan Greenspan, ex-US Federal Reserve Chairman, August 23, 2011 "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them." -- Pierre Beaumarchais (1732 - 1977)  "A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd." -- Max Lucado "The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?" -- "War Games", 1983 movie "In a highly globalised world, a more global monetary policy perspective is also called for to ensure lasting price and financial stability." -- BIS, 2011-12 annual report "As soon as you think you've got the key to the stock market, they change the lock." -- Joe Granville "The most exciting returns are to be had from an asset class where those who know it best, love it least." -- Don Coxe's definition of a bull market "If falsehood like truth had only one face, we would be in better shape. For we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field." Michel de Montaigne "An educated mind can entertain a thought without accepting it." -- Aristotle "The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios.. The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market." -- George Soros "You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don't understand that's going to happen, then you're not ready, you won't do well in the markets." -- Peter Lynch "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" -- Captain Renault, "Casablanca" "The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it." -- John Stuart Mill "Stop worrying about the world ending today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." -- Charles M. Schulz "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that men of good will do nothing." -- Cicero, B.C. "A country does not go bankrupt." -- Walter Wriston, Chairman of Citi Group, 1982, right after Mexico massively defaulted "Technical analysis is a windsock, not a crystal ball." -- P. Arthur Huprich "One... with courage makes a majority." -- Andrew Jackson "Many the wonders but nothing walks stranger than man." -- Sophocles, Antigone, c. 441 B.C. (translation by Elizabeth Wyckoff) "It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Preisdent Andrew Jackson, Veto of the Second Bank of the United States "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it." -- Buddha "Hyman Minsky developed an economics of financial instability, of instability bred by stability itself…Minsky’s approach, very different from Godley’s, is conceptual rather than statistical. A key virtue is that it puts finance at the center of economic analysis, analytically inseparable from what is sometimes called real economic activity, for the simple reason that capitalistic economies are run by banks. And, of course, his second great insight is into the dynamics of phase transitions: the famous movement from the hedge position to the speculative position to the intrinsically unsustainable, doomed to collapse ponzi position which arises from within the system and is subject actually to formalization in the endogenous instabilities of non-linear dynamical models. To grasp what Minsky is about, it seems to me, is to go immediately beyond the coarse notion of the “Minsky moment,” a concept which implies falsely that there are also non-Minsky moments. It is to recognize that the financial system is both necessary and dangerous, that strict financial regulation is both indispensable and imperfect." -- James Galbraith, 5th annual Dijon conference on Post Keynesian economics, Copenhagen, May 2011 "The paper system being founded on public confidence and having of itself no intrinsic value, it is liable to great and sudden fluctuations, thereby rendering property insecure and the wages of labor unsteady and uncertain. The corporations which create the paper money can not be relied upon to keep the circulating medium uniform in amount. In times of prosperity, when confidence is high, they are tempted by the prospect of gain or by the influence of those who hope to profit by it to extend their issues of paper beyond the bounds of discretion and the reasonable demands of business; and when these issues have been pushed on from day to day, until public confidence is at length shaken, then a reaction takes place, and they immediately withdraw the credits they have given, suddenly curtail their issues, and produce an unexpected and ruinous contraction of the circulating medium, which is felt by the whole community. The banks by this means save themselves, and the mischievous consequences of their imprudence or cupidity are visited upon the public. Nor does the evil stop here. These ebbs and flows in the currency and these indiscreet extensions of credit naturally engender a spirit of speculation injurious to the habits and character of the people. We have already seen its effects in the wild spirit of speculation in the public lands and various kinds of stock which within the last year or two seized upon such a multitude of our citizens and threatened to pervade all classes of society and to withdraw their attention from the sober pursuits of honest industry. It is not by encouraging this spirit that we shall best preserve public virtue and promote the true interests of our country; but if your currency continues as exclusively paper as it now is, it will foster this eager desire to amass wealth without labor; it will multiply the number of dependents on bank accommodations and bank favors; the temptation to obtain money at any sacrifice will become stronger and stronger, and inevitably lead to corruption, which will find its way into your public councils and destroy at no distant day the purity of your Government." -- President Andrew Jackson, in his farewell address of March 4, 1837 Source

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