America’s share of the world’s patents has increased from 10 percent when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 to 20 percent today. - Alan Greenspan

If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. — Speaking to a Senate Committee in 1987, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly, November 4, 2005.

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.

John Jacob Astor succeeded in amassing America’s biggest fortune by trading in the furs of beavers, otters, muskrats, and bears (though he wisely used some of the money he made from hunting in America’s great wilderness to buy real estate in Manhattan).