Quotes of the day

My work always tried to unite the True with the Beautiful, but when I had to choose one over the other, I usually chose the Beautiful.--Hermann Weyl

Investors, workers and employers need to have a sense of where tax, spending and regulatory policy are headed, or they will postpone decisions and further weaken the economy.--Michael Boskin

Beware. The mere ability to write, from the sidelines, "it should be done like X" doesn't eliminate the lessons of public choice economics.--Tyler Cowen

The anti-stimulus economist is attacked by pro-stimulus economists. But the pro-stimulus proponents are focused on attack. They are not putting up comparable empirical evidence of their own for the efficacy of fiscal policy and there is a reason for that, namely that the evidence isn't really there.--Tyler Cowen

All you know is you throw everything at it and whether it’s more effective if you’re fighting a fire to be concentrating the water flow on this part or that part. You’re going to use every weapon you have in fighting it. And people, they do not know exactly what the effects are. Economists like to talk about it, but in the end they’ve been very, very wrong and most of them in recent years on this. We don’t know the perfect answers on it. What we do know is to stand by and do nothing is a terrible mistake or to follow Hoover-like policies would be a mistake and we don’t know how effective in the short run we don’t know how effective this will be and how quickly things will right themselves.--Warren Buffet

I confess to a deep curiosity about how closely the watchdogs who bashed Bush on principle will actually hold Obama to account for his promises.--Megan McArdle

Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It's absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that's an awful lot of countryside.--James Lovelace, who pioneered the ozone-layer work that led to the global chloroflourocarbons ban

Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.--Al Gore, on extraordinary rendition, or having other countries torture terrorists for information