Engage yourself in the living present. The future will take care of itself.
In the 1930s one was aware of two great evils - mass unemployment and the threat of war.
My interest in economics has always been in the whole corpus of economic theory, the interrelationships between the various fields of theory and their relevance for the formulation of economic policy.
In Oxford before the war, I had, with this interest in mind, written a short textbook entitled, An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy. It was now my intention to rewrite this work.
My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.
The frontiers of knowledge in the various fields of our subject are expanding at such a rate that, work as hard as one can, one finds oneself further and further away from an understanding of the whole.
But my shift to the serious study of economics gradually weakened my belief in Major Douglas's A+B theorem, which was replaced in my thought by the expression MV = PT.
It is not the circumstances that make a person a success. It is how that person responds to those circumstances
The dyed-in-the-wool teacher takes everything seriously only with respect to his students--himself included.
[Albert Camus]didn't have much hope that things would work out, but he wanted them to. Algeria had reached such a degree of violence that once such violence is created there's no more room for reflection. And there's no mediating position. If you look at Bosnia today, the Croats, Bosnians and Serbs, they've all created so much horror that one starts to wonder how these peoples can live together, after having done what they have. Already the violence has reached such a degree that everybody is living in hate, there's no possibility of reflection, no mediating position.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think