A good quote via Krugman from the Treasure of the Sierra Madre:

Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn’t know anyone who knows of [...]

“Now, there’s one thing you might have noticed I don’t complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents [...]

Keynes as taken from Krugman’s recent excellent analysis of “freshwater” versus “saltwater” economists – trading is like:

“those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of [...]

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

- John Maynard Keynes

What’s old is new again (and again, and again, and…):

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their [...]

Take this and shove it up your “Tea Party”:

The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People’s Money out of [...]

I can never remember this quote, though it’s an important one, particularly now that I’m reading about the “Straussians“:

Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back [...]

“We have failed bankers giving advice to failed regulators on how to deal with failed assets”

- William Black, the deputy director of the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Company, via Barron’s.

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

- Benjamin Franklin

H. L. Mencken regarding the once progressive Al Smith, Governor of New York:

“His association with the rich has apparently wobbled him and changed him. He has become a golf player.”

I think it says it all.