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

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.

Every time in this century we've lowered the tax rates across the board, on employment, on saving, investment and risk-taking in this economy, revenues went up, not down.

We would certainly welcome the recipient nation to put their inspectors on our shores, if they wanted to make that investment to help protect that shipment that is outgoing.

When the students are occupied, they're not juvenile delinquents. I believe that education is a capital investment.

Modern medical advances have helped millions of people live longer, healthier lives. We owe these improvements to decades of investment in medical research.

We got more provisions for our whiskey than the same money, which we paid for the liquor, would have bought; so after all it proved a very profitable investment.

Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.

That's the value of a college education... I don't know anywhere in the world where you can make an investment and make that kind of return.

Traditional investment vehicles such as IRAs, CDs, stocks and bonds do have their place, but for the rich, they are used more as temporary storage facilities rather than life-long homes.

No other investment yields as great a return as the investment in education. An educated workforce is the foundation of every community and the future of every economy.

My best investment is my imagination, because it has never failed to bring me my greatest returns!

I can't think of any more important issue. If we get this right, we'll not only preserve our landscape for future generations we'll be able to generate I think more investment and more job opportunities in the inland and we sure as hell need those jobs.

There are opportunities in the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, so yes back home we are talking about investment opportunities in Morocco for various sectors of our economy and we will continue to do that.

One of the things that has been truly incredible to observe though, is the amount of venture investment that has gone into early stage security technology.

Leave no stone unturned to help your clients realize maximum profits from their investment.

Education is the investment our generation makes in the future.

If we are to attract private investment, if we are to be able to make the legislature feel the moneys from taxpayers are being used properly, we must be ever vigilant of the duty to efficiently use all funds we receive.

Well the wedding in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a fairy tale and there was a huge public impress, investment of goodwill, affection and indeed money in this Institution. It was a huge success at the time.

So if we're going to build new applications that require a large time investment, like say movie editing - today that doesn't matter for the enterprise desktop, but eventually it will when we get closer to consumers - you really need to have a cross-platform story.

Indeed, American companies make three times as much profits from their investment in one E.U. country, Ireland, than they do from all their investments in China.

The land is not in the least bit fertile and yet the cattle herds grow larger and larger. A cow represents capital investment here.

Education technology and school construction go together. Modernization, updating education facilities, and making a capital investment in education are all included.

International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.

I have no ego investment in being on the air. I don't knock others for whom that kind of attention is like oxygen, but I don't miss anything about it.

People really have to believe in their tax system. They have to believe that there is an equitable distribution of the burden, but there is also an important investment based upon the potential achievements that come from us paying our taxes.

The party line is that stocks historically have outperformed all other investment plans.

I have run large organizations, I know what it takes to create a healthy business climate, and I have more experience than Jerry Brown doing that. So it'll be a stark contrast, a career politician vs. someone who has met a payroll, gotten a return on investment, knows how to use technology to do more with less.

The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital... the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy.

If GE's strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.

If you search for poverty, you'll find it, often in the family. Why? Because the family makes this great investment, from which we all benefit, but for which no-one helps. We have to point the spotlight on the family, and make political choices that sustain the family.