If you look at the history of the American capital market, there's probably no innovation more important than the idea of generally accepted accountancy principles.

But ultimately what I was impressed by during my years in government was how much the intellectual climate and the prevailing intellectual notions constrained and represented the universe within which the discourse took place.

Contagion has become very much a phenomenon, and it's a phenomenon of globalization.

Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.

Politics has got too personal, too nasty, in Britain, as it has in America.

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves.

We have to give people dreams; we have to give people hope. In terms of government, in terms of society, that's our goal. You can't have a group of people that don't dream, that see themselves as dead or in jail.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.