There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.

Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.

One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

I don't think that a mutual fund that invests exclusively in biotech start-ups or invests exclusively in companies in Thailand offers any great safety or diversification.

I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.

The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information.

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.

If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?

Our loved ones are always with us whether they are of the flesh or of the spirit.

I myself don't know what makes my books work. I enter a bookstore and I'm frankly overwhelmed by the number of books in most of them, and I know people are buying mine.

Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.

You would never understand, Kim. You think I'm normal; you wish I was.

It's my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn't like to ask. I know I have. But I'd rather teach them than practice them any day. "Give them to others"-that's my motto.

War stinks! There's nothing good about it. But you know the whole thing, it's you or them.

I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.

I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.

There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.