A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

Some suggestions for you :

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.

I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.

I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.