"The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time."

"Art is often valuable precisely because it isn't a sensible way to make money."

"'Reinventing the Bazaar,' by John McMillan, is a great and fun introduction to the wild variety and importance of markets throughout history and around the world. I finally understood how a Middle Eastern souk actually works economically and how to compare that to modern-day telecom-spectrum auctions. I love that book."

"Hating Wall Street is an American tradition that dates back even to the days when Thomas Jefferson cursed that money lover Alexander Hamilton. And for centuries, the complaints about it have largely stayed the same: 'It does nothing! It creates chaos! It's a parasite that sucks hardworking Americans dry!'"

"My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background."

"Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system."

"When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money."

"I set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and begin to try to find a bacteriophage system which we might use to solve the genetic code."