Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and Jean-Claude Trichet are in the duck blind and a bird flies overhead.
Bernanke looks at it and says, "Looks like a duck, flies like a duck... it's probably a duck," shoots at it but misses and the bird flies away.
The next bird flies overhead, and Monsieur Trichet looks at it, then looks through the pages of a bird manual, and says, "Hmmmm...green wings, yellow bill, quacking sound...might be a duck." He raises his gun to shoot it, but the bird is long gone.
A third bird flies over. Greenspan raises his gun and shoots suddenly, brings it down, and turns and says, "Can someone go see if that was a duck?"
"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined. Suddenly it all comes to be, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or more accurately what you haven’t done. For that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free