Perhaps a Less Suitable Quotation ...

Optimism

Charles Schultz (not a former Secretary of Treasury, rather a famous cartoonist) has Charlie Brown say,

"I have a new philosophy. I am going to dread one day at a time."

Here is a view from a higher post:

"Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line." ---Justice Anthony Kennedy commenting on the experience of serving on the Supreme Court.

Agreement

"There is nothing an economist should fear so much as applause." --- Herbert Marshall

"Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler." --- Eric Temple Bell, Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (p.146)

Down to Numbers --- and Symmetry

"Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." ---Garrison Keillor

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." --- Albert Einstein

"Bartender, a refreshing beverage and a dry cocktail napkin for a few calculations, please." ---The Motley Fool on retirement planning, but applicable any place where calculators convene.

"A short mnemonic for remembering the first seven decimal digits of pi is "How I wish I could calculate pi !" --- from Mathworld where mnemonics for many more terms may be found.

"You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue: You condense it with locusts and tape: Still keeping one principal object in view---To preserve its symmetrical shape." Lewis Carroll (C.L. Dodgeson) The Hunting of the Snark, MacMillan, London 1893.

Outstanding in His Field

"Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing." --- Konrad Lorenz

China

"Any doubt I might have had about the globalization of economic thinking was shattered when I met with Chinese Premier Zhu Rhongi in early 1997 in the same pavilion where Chairman Mao had received foreign visitors. After being offered a Diet Coke I was asked a variety of searching questions about the possible use of put options in defending a currency, and how they might be best structured." ---J. Bradford deLong (former Under Secretary of Treasury, now Berkeley Professor)

 

Article Titles: What Were They Thinking?

“The non-omission of nonfinite be (2003). In Anne Dahl, Peter Svenonius & Marit Richardsen Westergaard (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics: Acquisition. Nordlyd 31(3), 606-622.

 

Clinton, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade

"Vote for Clinton again?

As Voltaire is said to have replied when the Marquis de Sade invited him to a second orgy, since he'd enjoyed the first one so much:

`No thanks. Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.' "

J. Bradford deLong (former Under Secretary of Treasury, now Berkeley Professor)

J. Michael Steele's favorite little gold line

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