Paul A. Volcker Quotes

Logic, sometimes has very little to do with political action.

To delay action until there Is one hundred percent certainty Is always to postpone political action forever.

All market response results from a reduction of uncertainty.

Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

A day may sink or save a realm.

Turn on to politics, or politics will turn on you.

In politics, as in business, leadership is crucial.

Washington - having spent a lot of time there, I grew up there and have spent a lot of time there recently - is largely defined by detailed analytical views and policy choices that are not very good. You know, each policy choice has a winner and a loser, right? Somebody's ox is getting gored.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.

We had the controlling shares but we weren’t in control.

Leaders respond when they perceive that there will be a political cost of inaction.

The fact that you needed to know was not known at the time that the now known need to know, was known. Therefore, those that needed to advise and inform the Home Secretary perhaps felt the information he needed as to whether to inform the highest authority of the known information was not yet known and therefore there was no authority for the authority to be informed because the need to know was not, at that time, known or needed.

The person who knows "how" will always have a job. The person who knows "why" will always be his boss

It's one thing to make the speeches. It's another to make the tough decisions.

Wisdom ofttimes consists of knowing what to do next.

The people are difficult to govern: It is because those in authority are too fond of action [change].

Markets are self-regulating only because some brave investors are prepared to bet against the market trend.

If I have written too polemically, it is only because of the passionate concern that we consider because it is too late whether we truly know what we are doing.

In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.

What did they know, when did they know it, and what did they do about it.

There is nothing that is not political.

Sometime between elections we should concentrate on doing something.