L.A. Paul Quotes

I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

The habit of disguising ideology as expertise has created a deficit of legitimacy.

Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.

Social Security is a social insurance program - it is not designed to be the same thing as a 401(k).

The French, unfortunately, actually believe what they say, and that has been very destructive.

If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.

The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.

And when the chickens that didn't hatch come home to roost, we will rue the day when, misled by sloppy accounting and rosy scenarios, we gave away the national nest egg.

There's one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that's inflation.

People who are complaining about the Fed are people who've been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn't happened.

What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.

Evidence and expertise have a well-known liberal bias.

But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.

The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.

I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.

I don't think I've had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried.

But where will the Fed find another bubble?

[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.

This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.

The trouble with poverty, as an issue, is that it has basically exhausted the patience of the general public.

Not all private equity people are evil. Only some.

Republican candidates had to appeal to their base, which is by and large elderly white people arguing with empty chairs.

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.

...instead it seems that business - like weight loss - is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.

The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

Democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.

In fact, I'd say that the sources of the economy's expansion from 2003 to 2007 were, in order, the housing bubble, the war, and - very much in third place - tax cuts.

I'm not sure that the current value of the NASDAQ is justified, but I'm not sure that it isn't.

By rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.

When the Fed decides that inflation is too high, they have the tools, and they've shown historically that they have the will, to bring it down. And, it might be painful.

I really think that people have to think safety; taking risks for higher yield is a bad idea once you're in late or latish middle age.

Tax cuts were not going to be effective at creating jobs, and the job creation record is lousy.

I think Stockman is an interesting sort of amalgam.

We cannot remain silent when someone of the Pope's stature and credibility confuses religious principles for science

No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith.

Most humans feel the transcendent temptation, the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning.

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times.

I always had a sense of liking diagrams, from the time I was studying architecture. Architecture is built diagrams, basically.

In other words, [ H.P. Lovecraft] was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he just didn't want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf, who considered religion the ultimate obscenity.

Long John I think went off the air in about '79 or something, so there was a hiatus. That's why I think Art Bell thought there was a spot to be filled. He was doing exactly the same thing.

I first heard of [Orfeo Angelucci] from Giuseppe Conti who gave me some books by him.

I did do, well before Pop Art, all the cartoon characters as paintings.

I've kind of always done diagrams. It helped me think.

I was sent to the regular public schools until I had to go to Belmont Hill. Because I wasn't doing anything. The public school was nothing, just a total waste of time.

You know, people who can draw get upset when people who can't start telling them what to do!

When I was at Brown. In other words, I'd heard about [H.P. Lovecraft], but I didn't pay that much attention till I happened to go to a meeting about it. And then I got just totally turned on.

I would say that it's probably impossible for a lot of people to even think what H.P. Lovecraft's theological state was.