[Paul] mentioned that he had heard about a piece I had written on Irvi — Paul Samuelson

"Science is not art. Yet, despite the lack of complete identity between art and science, there is much in common among different creative processes."

"Paul Samuelson is omnipresent in American and even world economics; like Joyces Humphrey Chimpeden Earwicker or Melvilles Confidence Man,. he appears at every turn of history and in every disguise."

"Needless to say, the partial equilibrium assumptions involved in the domestic demand schedules and the neglect of aggregative relations constitute a serious defect of such a model except as a rough first approximation to the answers in especially favorable cases. Good economic theory will recognize these limitations rather than be predisposed to neglect them."

"I think the acceptance of "mathematical expectation of utility" or its "arithmetic mean" was an unthinking carryover from the mathematical theory of the law of large numbers as applied to asymptotic processes."

"Perhaps all we can expect of a public body, charged with grave responsibilities, is that it should in its public utterances make out cases stronger than it really believes in. Or perhaps, because its opposition deals in overly strong criticisms, it may for political reasons and for understandable psychological reasons provide overly strong rebuttals. Or perhaps it is the case that the authorities believe that there are no sensible reasons to doubt the following view: The way to maximize growth, to maximize the long-run degree of achieved employment, to maximize equity among the various social groups that could be affected by price level changes is, in the absence of important cost pressures and even more in their presence, for the Federal Reserve to insist upon the attainment of essentially stable long-run price levels."

"The goals, methods, and strategies of what borders on science is different from the gyration of fashion and the incommensurability of arts and music in different epochs. Because this different process of cumulative science is imperfect, historians and philosophers of science intermittently downplay this difference."