“That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables.”

“John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.”

“The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”

“Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”

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