"Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums."

“Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.”

“The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it becameNew York, London or Tokyo.”

“A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.”

“Wall Street's crime, in the eyes of its classical enemies, was less its power than its morals.”

“Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.”

“Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.”