There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
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.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
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.
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
War remains the decisive human failure.
There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
