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You wouldn't think there was a need for a Coase Theorem, really.

I tend to regard the Coase theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs.

I don't need much coaxing.

Math does come easily to me, but I was always much more interested in what theorems imply about the world than in proving them.

I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven't met, I suppose I'd most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem.

The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest.

Wiley has given me wise words a few times.

I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.