Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

War remains the decisive human failure.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

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

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.

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

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 enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

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.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

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.

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.