I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.

What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.

I went to elementary school in Ottawa, and then to a private secondary school.

My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.

My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school.

When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.

My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.

The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990.

My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.

I was opposed to World War II, and indeed on June 22, 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union I suddenly found myself the lone supporter of peace since everybody else had, because of their communist beliefs, shifted over to become supporters of the war.

Our family life was certainly not intellectual.

It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.

I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s.

In 1972 I married again, to Elisabeth Case; she continues to be wife, companion, critic and editor: a partner in the projects and programs that we undertake.

I had hoped to go to law school, but the war started, and because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill anybody, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley.

While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.

I continue to be a photographer; I have enjoyed fishing and hunting with a close friend; and have owned two ranches, first in northern California and then in the state of Washington.

I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.

My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of my work in the last 15 years has been done.

In '87, I used to do this awful, awful James Brown impression.

Churchill was one of the few men I have met who even in the flesh give me the impression of genius. George Bernard Shaw is another. It is amusing to know that each thinks the other is overrated.

When I first started editing GQ, it gave the impression of being, and in fact was, a gay magazine. There were female models in it and there were women on the cover, but the boys were always much, much more beautiful than the girls.

Politics is too partisan, and sometimes patriotism is cast aside. Patriotism is honor and love of your country and your brothers and sisters. With politics I get the impression that it's all about what's good for the party and not necessarily what's good for the country.

Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion.

The impression I have of Justice Warren is that he was looking for the just result in a case regardless of fixed dogma or principles and I like to think that I'm in that mold.

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.

Getting the Oscar had the biggest impression on me.

Whatever makes an impression on the heart seems lovely in the eye.

A quiet impression could be a personal instruction from the Lord. It is personal and private. It comes from the Lord. Why is it important to keep sacred writings private? Because then He will give us more.

This whole fuss did not only damage Fischer's image, but that of the USA as well. The way the Americans treated one of their most popular citizens did not make a positive impression worldwide.

I've no idea what they make of me. People usually don't recognise themselves in an impression.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

A poor choice of words conveyed to some the impression that I embrace the discarded policies of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by my statement.

My first impression when I made it through was 'Good, because I'm going to prove to you that I deserve to be here', because they told me that sometimes I lack confidence in my performance and sometimes I'm not as consistent as they'd like me to be.

For me it's always about first impressions. I trust my instincts. I love to prepare if it's something that requires training. But I don't like to prepare the psychology too much. I enjoy the psychology of the character but I work better from a first impression.

My first public impression was my French teacher, Derek Swift.

The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really congenial occupation such as slum demolition or debt collecting.

My impression was, he's walking as though he's made of glass, and if you should touch him he would just shatter apart. I don't know if it was an act or what, but it sure was effective.

I am sure that the sad days and happenings were rare, and that I lived the joyous and careless life of other children; but just because the happy days were so habitual to me they made no impression upon my mind, and I can no longer recall them.

Every view, and every object I studied attentively, by viewing them again and again on every side, for I was anxious to make a lasting impression of it on my imagination.

This new art made a deep impression on me, and I began to study it ardently.

Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.

Rwanda was considered a second-class operation; because it was a small country, we had been able to maintain a kind of status quo. They were negotiating, they'd accepted the new peace project, so we were under the impression that everything would be solved easily.

In the morning he was lying dead on one of the beds fully clothed. He was dead. I got the impression he wanted to go, and I must have killed him. I can't remember strangling him. I just sat there shocked.

An attempt is already underway to revise history - to leave the impression that the former president had nothing to do with Watergate. But there is no doubt about his obstruction of justice after the Watergate break-in.

They see us interacting with people, they see us doing serious interviews, they see us having fun, and when you're conversing with someone, you get a much clearer impression of who that person is than if they are just reading into a news piece.

As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression.

But I have the satisfaction, at the same time, to reflect that the impression to be made depends upon the consistency of the charge and the motives of the prosecutors.