Great Quotes I Read Today

Again, with a nod to Tyler Cowen, I present two excellent quotations I came across today.

First one comes from the recently late Samuel Huntington’s magnificent Political Order in Changing Societies:

“The abjectly poor, too,” Eric Hoffer observed, “stand in awe of the world around them and are not hospitable to change… There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.”

Some might read this passage as a call to try harder at changing the world. Huntington, of course, is not having any of that. If you, like me, have been putting off tackling this moderately dense book, don’t put it off any longer.

Next up, Martin Wolf attributes the following to Hyman Minsky:

“A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.”

Zing! So much for the brilliance of financiers. Wolf’s article is worth reading in full, by the way: the chief economics commentator of the stalwart Financial Times has discovered his inner Keynes.