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1. People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
2. The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
3. Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
4. In economics, the majority is always wrong.
5. We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
6. The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
7. The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
8. The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
9. By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
10. All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
11. If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
12. All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
13. We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
14. A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
15. Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
16. Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
17. Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
18. Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.
19. It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
20. The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.