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.

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.

I'm doing a little consulting. I'm somewhat retired, still a director of a company or two.

Take the tone of the company you are in.

So I decided to form a production company with my wife and our partner Diane.

Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.

This kid's excited because he's with Bad Company and I'm excited because I'm with Chuck Berrys' son.

It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.

Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.

Without In The Company of Men, I could still be teaching, so who knows if this would've existed.

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.

That co-operation and peace rather than industrial strife and strikes will best promote the prosperity of the employees the company and all of the people and even strengthen the nation.

Our loss was very heavy, especially in the officers. Capt. Sale, of Co. E, Duke's regt, was among the killed, making the third Capt. that has been killed in that company.

It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.

I used to be pretty reckless. When I was a runner for a production company, I drove a massive 16 seater van. I was only 18. I mean I look young now, but then I looked about 12.

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet.

I didn't need to depend on the record company to publish my records.

So I've learned in the past, if a company approaches me and they want something like this, or something like that that I've done and I turn them down, they're going to do it anyhow.

No company can afford not to move forward. It may be at the top of the heap today but at the bottom of the heap tomorrow, if it doesn't.

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

Hollywood is what you make it; you have to choose company with care because you become what they are.

Bad company is like a nail driven into a post, which, after the first and second blow, may be drawn out with little difficulty; but being once driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold to draw it out, but which can only be done by the destruction of the wood.

In 1979 I teamed up with my friend and business partner, Bill DeWitt, and together we formed an oil and gas company that invested through limited partnerships in oil and gas exploration.

One hundred percent of our earnings are reinvested in the company, and a great deal of that goes to research.

What we learned several years ago was that one of our weaknesses would be if we didn't develop enough people with the know-how to run our company, it would come to the point where we would just stop.

The President's announcement sounded less like a national energy plan than like a page from an election-year play book. This Administration's plan to reduce obscene oil company profits is to regulate them less.

I don't want a record company, but I need one, unfortunately.

Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation - what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.