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

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Essentially, every technology you have ever heard of, where electrons move from here to there, has the potential to be revolutionized by the availability of molecular wires made up of carbon. Organic chemists will start building devices. Molecular electronics could become reality.

Past experience has shown that the Islamists gain space when civilian authority weakens.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.

We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

With more than 67 percent of the Nation's freight moving on highways, economists believe that our ability to compete internationally is tied to the quality of our infrastructure.

Ergonomists are not physicians - they are engineers - and their medical theories are controversial. Some of the world's leading medical researchers deny that repetitive motion causes injury.

Some struggle with medical issues - like insomnia - that make sleep hard. But for many of us, the quantity and quality of sleep come down to a matter of choice. Still, only a few enterprising economists have looked closely at this, and generally, those have assumed that we choose our hours of sleep optimally.

We must always remember with gratitude and admiration the first sailors who steered their vessels through storms and mists, and increased our knowledge of the lands of ice in the South.

I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.

My lesson from history is that if there is a strong moderate centrist party which can lead the country, there is no room for extremists from the right or left.

In a way, we are magicians. We are alchemists, sorcerers and wizards. We are a very strange bunch. But there is great fun in being a wizard.

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.

Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots.

You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.

American economists can't understand the German fear of inflation and the effects of inflation when dealing with the world economic crisis. They wonder why Germany pursues such a different course - 'Why can't they agree with us?' I would have thought it was fairly obvious.

Economists agree about economics - and that's a science - and they disagree about economic policy because that's a value judgment... I've had profound disagreements on policy with the famous Milton Friedman. But, on economics, we agree.