The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization

...it is distressing how often one can guess the answer given to an economic question merely by knowing who asks it.

I attended schools in Seattle through the University of Washington, from which I was graduated in 1931. I spent the next year at Northwestern University.

Competition is a tough weed, not a delicate flower.

There is only one social science and we are its practitioners

If you never miss a plane, you’re spending too much time at the airport.

My teaching began in 1936 at Iowa State College where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman.

I recall my mother asking in about 1946 what I was and I replied proudly that I was a professor. A decade later she repeated her question and I repeated my answer. "No promotion?" was her comment.

Theories are not rejected by cirsumstantial evidence: it takes a theory to beat a theory.

It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation.

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.

For a short burst of time, we completely belong to each other, absorbed by the needs of our physicality, glued together by the passion of our lips.

What's on your billboard?

And I swear, she tasted like the sun.

Come and trip it as ye go On the light fantastic toe.

I have lots of ideas. The problem for me has always been which one to do.

It is finished, is never said of us

Ours is the "land of the free"-nobody denies that-nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.)

Vanity makes people ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible.

I just think they look good on people. You spend a lot of time in the mirror looking at yourself when you have tattoos. Same way with other people. It just looks good.

Money is a necessity; so is dirt.