Stilltitled

Some concerns about the asset-price inflation are overstated. Policy makers want to reflate asset prices as part of the recovery; if that starts getting out of hand, then you can get worries about future asset bubbles. These concerns I think are somewhat premature.

—David Riley, head of global sovereign ratings at Fitch Ratings

You got people out there saying the bear market rally’s over. I think they’re smoking dope.

—Jeffrey Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond James & Associates in St. Petersburg, Florida, which manages $214 billion.

It’s just a reversal of excessive pessimism. We still have a lot more bull market to go because we had such a huge bear market…The economy is not recovering at a slow pace. America is faster than people think. Third-quarter GDP numbers knocked the socks off of expectations.

—Kenneth Fisher

I think this case is the case of the century for patent law

—John F. Duffy, a professor at the George Washington University Law School

It’s not very often that some obscure issue of patent law can excite so much attention.

—Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law and information management at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Her brief argued that the State Street decision in 1998 had the effect of “knocking patent law loose from its historical moorings and improperly injecting patents into business areas where they were neither needed nor wanted.”

[The bourgeousie] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.”…It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.

—Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto…”All that is solid melts into air.” Also of interest, The Cash Nexus, Nial Ferguson (2001)

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

—Heidegger, from his Letter on Humanism. Richard Rorty would go on to say, “You cannot read most of the important philosophers of recent times without taking Heidegger’s thought into account,” but ”the smell of smoke from the crematories [will] linger on their pages.”

teaching Heidegger’s ideas without disclosing his deep Nazi sympathies is like showing a child a brilliant fireworks display without warning that an ignited rocket can also blow up in someone’s face.

—Patricia Cohen, reviewing Emmanuel Faye’s recent book on Heidegger

The more you read the later Heidegger, the more you realize that the distinctions between language, human beings, and Being are being deliberately and systematically blurred.

—Richard Rorty, who continued, “I read this blurring as a warning, analagous to Wittgenstein’s, against trying to get between language and its object, plus a further warning against trying to get between language and its user.”

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

—Paul Krugman: another instance of Richard Hofstadter, cited again, and again

And he was one of the first at the paper to realize the centrality of the web and also one of the first to realize that on the web, a journalist’s personal brand can sometimes be more valuable than that of the institution that employs him.

—on Andrew Ross Sorkin

Jon Corzine showed a lot of courage in doing what will benefit New Jersey for years to come and he paid a price for it.

—Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania