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Famous Economics Quotes
"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. "
Everett Dirksen
"A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well as afterward. "
Anonymous
"An economist is an expert who will know tommorow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. "
Laurence J. Peter
"An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. "
Laurence J. Peter
"An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides. "
John H. Patterson
"Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers, six if one went to Harvard. "
Edgar R. Fiedler
"Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers; six if one went to Harvard. "
Edgar R. Fiedler
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. "
Keynes
"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. "
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Economists are people who work with numbers but don't have the personality to be accountants. "
Anonymous
"I am not an economist. I am an honsest man! "
Paul McCracken
"I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position. "
Mark Twain
"I'd give $1000 to be a millionaire. "
Lewis Timberlake
"I'm proud of paying taxes. The only thing is--I could be just as proud for half the money. "
Arthur Godfrey
"If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it ... it would have been much better. "
Karl Marx's mother
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. "
Anonymous
"If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars. "
J. Paul Getty
"Isn't it strange? The same people who laugh at gypsy fortune tellers take economists seriously. "
Cincinnati Enquirer
"Money couldnt buy friends, but you get a better class of enemy. "
Spike Milligan
"Money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years. "
Anonymous
"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didnt have it and thought of other things if you did. "
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
"The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization. "
Mikhail Gorbachev
"The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs. "
Karl Marx
"The trick is to stop thinking it as 'your' money. "
IRS auditor
"There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody. "
Adlai Stevenson, in Bill Adler, The Stevenson Wit
"What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel. "
Frank Adams
"When better business decisions are made, economists won't make them. "
H. V. Prochnow
"When its a question of money, everybody is of the same religion. "
Voltaire
"The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted."
Edmund Burke
"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"In economics, the majority is always wrong."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life."
John Richard Hicks
"Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one's wishes."
Nikita Khrushchev
"It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy."
Stephen Butler Leacock
"Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn."
Henry Louis Mencken
"Too often in recent history liberal governments have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"The consumer, so it is said, is the king, each is a voter who uses his money as votes to get the things done that he wants done."
Paul A. Samuelson, Economics (8th ed.)
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
George Bernard Shaw
"The truth is we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless."
Thomas Woodrow Wilson", "America's planned contribution to the global AIDS fund is around a sixth of what is needed in 2003, according to the fund itself."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise and hands-on experience than any other organisations in the world."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Devaluations are never easy."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Development can really work everywhere. But most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Andean region, and Central Asia face obstacles."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Globalization was a deep trend pushed by technology and right ideas, as much as anything else."
Jeffrey Sachs
"I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis."
Jeffrey Sachs
"If George Bush spent more time and money on mobilising Weapons of Mass Salvation in addition to combating Weapons of Mass Destruction, we might actually get somewhere in making this planet a safer and more hospitable home."
Jeffrey Sachs
"If the whole world went into recession, all the major central banks could cut interest rates and expand the money supply."
Jeffrey Sachs
"If we did go into a recession, something that's always possible for the U.S. or Europe, we could lower interest rates and expand the money supply without worrying about the price of gold."
Jeffrey Sachs
"If you have a lot of short-term debt, it means that all of that money can be demanded in a very short period of time. Technically, short-term debt means money that's coming due within a year. Typically, it means money that's coming due within 30 to 90 days."
Jeffrey Sachs
"In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided they'd borrow a bit more and do even better."
Jeffrey Sachs
"In the early 1990s, when a lot of the developing world opened up to international capital flows... they ended up in very good long-term projects, but projects that weren't going to pay off for five or 10 or 20 years."
Jeffrey Sachs
"It's not so unusual to run out of someone else's currency."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Let's start fresh with Russia on some real help and some real reform."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Russia has gone through eight years of continuing economic pain."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Russia increasingly lived on short-term borrowing. Now, this was an extraordinary merry-go-round."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Senior development specialists in the Treasury can be counted on one hand. America's government is not even aware of the gap between its commitments and action, because almost nobody in authority understands the actions that would be needed to meet the commitments."
Jeffrey Sachs
"The basic idea was that if a country would put its economy as an integrated piece of the world system, that it would benefit from that with economic growth. I concur with that basic view."
Jeffrey Sachs
"The broader issue of the real role of the U.S., the foreign assistance aspect of that, who's going to pay for the security of a global economy?"
Jeffrey Sachs
"The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a world of shared prosperity."
Jeffrey Sachs
"The idea that the UN system could provide real leadership on the great development challenges will strain credulity in some quarters."
Jeffrey Sachs
"The idea that UN commitments should be followed by action is indeed a radical one, especially for the United States, where wilful neglect of its own commitments is the rule."
Jeffrey Sachs
"The longer you wait, the less fun. If you wait until the bitter end, the whole economy can be destroyed."
Jeffrey Sachs
"The runs started in Thailand after the IMF intervened in such a dramatic way. Then the IMF came to Indonesia."
Jeffrey Sachs
"The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge."
Jeffrey Sachs
"The truth of good economic doctoring is to know the general principles, and to really know the specifics. To understand the context, and also, to understand that an economy may need some tender loving care, not just the so-called hard truths, if it's going to get by."
Jeffrey Sachs
"The volatility of international capital is obviously destabilizing markets today."
Jeffrey Sachs
"There's a lot of strength in the U.S., but there's a lot of froth also. The froth will blow off. We're going to have to face up to some realities that we're not fully facing up to right now."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Unfortunately, the real focus in this country has not been on the rest of the world. It's been on our own issues and our own problems. Fair enough. But it means that our simple hopes that everything will just work out abroad aren't really coming to pass."
Jeffrey Sachs
"We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different."
Jeffrey Sachs
"We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy."
Jeffrey Sachs
"We, being the Western world, wouldn't let Russia off the hook on debt. So there were demands on debt servicing in the early days until they ran out of reserves. There was no real aid program, just a fictional aid program."
Jeffrey Sachs
"We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy."
Jeffrey Sachs
"We've taken the view that if the rest of the world would democratize and create market economies, that would spread the benefits of prosperity around the world, and that it would enhance our own prosperity, and our own stability and security, as well."
Jeffrey Sachs
"When countries open up to trade, they generally benefit, because they can sell more, then they can buy more. And trade has two-way gain."
Jeffrey Sachs
"When is the last time anybody heard Vice President Dick Cheney even feign a word of concern for the world's poor?"
Jeffrey Sachs
"White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues."
Jeffrey Sachs
"Fines are preferable to imprisonment and other types of punishment because they are more efficient. With a fine, the punishment to offenders is also revenue to the State."
Gary Becker
"I was not sympathetic to the assumption that criminals had radically different motivations from everyone else."
Gary Becker
"My work on human capital began with an effort to calculate both private and social rates of return to men, women, blacks, and other groups from investments in different levels of education."
Gary Becker
"Still, intuitive assumptions about behavior is only the starting point of systematic analysis, for alone they do not yield many interesting implications."
Gary Becker
"The analysis assumes that individuals maximize welfare as they conceive it, whether they be selfish, altruistic, loyal, spiteful, or masochistic. Their behavior is forward-looking, and it is also consistent over time."
Gary Becker
"The failure of Malthus's simple model of fertility persuaded economists that family-size decisions lay beyond economic calculus."
Gary Becker
"The Treatise tries to analyze not only modern Western families, but also those in other cultures and the changes in family structure during the past several centuries."
Gary Becker
"Why in almost all societies have married women specialized in bearing and rearing children and in certain agricultural activities, whereas married men have done most of the fighting and market work?"
Gary Becker
"The poorer is a family, the greater is the proportion of the total outgo which must be used for food... The proportion of the outgo used for food, other things being equal, is the best measure of the material standard of living of a population."
Ernst Engel
"With rising incomes, the share of expenditures for food products declines. The resulting shift in expenditures affects demand patterns and employment structures."
Ernst Engel
"A rise in the level of saving can reduce aggregate activity temporarily but only a sustained high level of saving makes it possible to have the sustained high level of business investment that contributes to the long-run growth of output."
Martin Feldstein
"A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets."
Martin Feldstein
"After all, an overvalued dollar gives us the ability to buy foreign goods at lower prices. And the existing volume of exports brings more yen and euros than they would if the dollar were more competitive."
Martin Feldstein
"Although economists have studied the sensitivity of import and export volumes to changes in the exchange rate, there is still much uncertainty about just how much the dollar must change to bring about any given reduction in our trade deficit."
Martin Feldstein
"An increase in the relative price of products from the low wage manufacturers in Asia and Latin America will also make those products less attractive to American consumers."
Martin Feldstein
"And finally, no matter how good the science gets, there are problems that inevitably depend on judgement, on art, on a feel for financial markets."
Martin Feldstein
"And when the dollar decline makes foreign travel much more expensive, I will do more of my vacation traveling in the United States."
Martin Feldstein
"But because we in the United States finance our current account deficit by borrowing in our own currency, we can move to a more competitive dollar without the adverse effects that followed currency declines in other countries."
Martin Feldstein
"But the primary reason for wanting the dollar to become more competitive in the near future is that we may need an increase in exports this year and in 2007 to sustain the economy's current pace of expansion."
Martin Feldstein
"But then in April of 1985 the dollar began a sharp decline. The dollar's trade weighted value fell 23 percent in just 12 months and by a total of 37 percent by the beginning of 1988."
Martin Feldstein
"But, third, science cannot replace judgement because there are too many things that we simply do not understand."
Martin Feldstein
"Domestic inflation reflects domestic monetary policy."
Martin Feldstein
"Even if the dollar does decline during the coming months, the delays in the response of exports and imports to the more competitive dollar will mean that the increase in aggregate demand from this source may not happen for a year or more."
Martin Feldstein
"First, I think the science of monetary economics has clearly gotten better."
Martin Feldstein
"Homeowners who refinanced their mortgages took out cash and reduced their monthly payments at the same time. Much of the cash obtained by refinancing was spent on consumer durables, home improvements and the like."
Martin Feldstein
"Household saving fell from 2.5 per cent of after-tax income in the third quarter of 2003 to a remarkable minus 1.8 per cent two years later."
Martin Feldstein
"I think that over the last few decades, we have seen better economic outcomes than in the past."
Martin Feldstein
"If the Federal Reserve pursues a strong dollar at home while the dollar becomes more competitive in global markets, we can achieve both price stability and a more balanced path of economic growth."
Martin Feldstein
"In short, both experience and economic theory imply that the US could now t to a more competitive dollar without experiencing either increased inflation or decreased economic growth."
Martin Feldstein
"Increased government spending can provide a temporary stimulus to demand and output but in the longer run higher levels of government spending crowd out private investment or require higher taxes that weaken growth by reducing incentives to save, invest, innovate, and work."
Martin Feldstein
"Inflation is lower and more stable and the real business cycle fluctuations are more modest."
Martin Feldstein
"My theme this evening is that America needs a competitive dollar."
Martin Feldstein
"Of course, everything is not perfect. We see high unemployment and low productivity growth, but these are (as previous speakers have emphasized) the result of poor structural policies rather than inappropriate monetary policy."
Martin Feldstein
"Refinancing allowed households to take out cash to spend on other things while also reducing their monthly mortgage payments."
Martin Feldstein
"So just as I want pilots on the planes that I fly, when it comes to monetary policy, I want to think that there is someone with sound judgement at the controls."
Martin Feldstein
"The decline of the overvalued dollar in the 1980s also had no adverse effect on economic activity in the United States."
Martin Feldstein
"The good news is that a competitive dollar in the global market and a strong dollar at home are compatible in both the long run and during the transition to a more competitive dollar."
Martin Feldstein
"The household saving rate has been falling since the early 1990s, declining from 7 percent in 1990 to just 2.4 percent in 2002."
Martin Feldstein
"The key to the economy's strength in 2004 and 2005 was that household saving declined dramatically while the price of oil rose."
Martin Feldstein
"The more competitive value of the dollar turned around the trade deficit."
Martin Feldstein
"The only way that we can reduce our financial dependence on the inflow of funds from the rest of the world is to reduce our trade deficit."
Martin Feldstein
"The price of imported oil in the US doubled between summer 2003 and summer 2005, reducing consumers' purchasing power by more than 1 per cent of gross domestic product."
Martin Feldstein
"Thirty years ago, many economists argued that inflation was a kind of minor inconvenience and that the cost of reducing inflation was too high a price to pay. No one would make those arguments today."
Martin Feldstein
"To finance this trade deficit, the U.S. has to borrow from the rest of the world or sell American assets like stocks, businesses, and real estate to the rest of the world."
Martin Feldstein
"Today's macroeconomic problems require attention to more fundamental forces of individual incentives and institutional rigidities."
Martin Feldstein
"Unless the trade deficit shrinks, the combination of the trade deficit and the interest and dividend payments to foreigners will grow ever more rapidly."
Martin Feldstein
"We also do not understand why long-term rates have not increased while the Federal Reserve has been raising short-term rates."
Martin Feldstein
"We are particularly poor at the open economy issues."
Martin Feldstein
"We do not understand the links between asset prices, monetary policy, and aggregate demand. We do not understand speculative markets adequately."
Martin Feldstein
"We pay some price when necessary to bring down inflation but that price is temporary and is not large relative to the permanent gain from reduced inflation."
Martin Feldstein
"Why has this improvement in inflation and in the business cycle occurred? I think the answer is better monetary policy, better central banking."
Martin Feldstein
"With sound monetary policy, the increases in import prices are offset by lower inflation for domestically produced goods and services."
Martin Feldstein
"Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
Irving Fisher
"The rate of interest acts as a link between income-value and capital-value."
Irving Fisher
"A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
Milton Friedman
"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it."
Milton Friedman
"Governments never learn. Only people learn."
Milton Friedman
"Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned."
Milton Friedman
"History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition."
Milton Friedman
"I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible."
Milton Friedman
"I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal."
Milton Friedman
"Inflation is taxation without legislation."
Milton Friedman
"Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation."
Milton Friedman
"Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government."
Milton Friedman
"Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property."
Milton Friedman
"One man's opportunism is another man's statesmanship."
Milton Friedman
"Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless."
Milton Friedman
"The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people."
Milton Friedman
"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."
Milton Friedman
"The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy."
Milton Friedman
"The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit."
Milton Friedman
"The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes."
Milton Friedman
"The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom."
Milton Friedman
"The power to do good is also the power to do harm."
Milton Friedman
"The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system."
Milton Friedman
"There's no such thing as a free lunch."
Milton Friedman
"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
Milton Friedman
"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork."
Milton Friedman
"A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"In economics, the majority is always wrong."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"More die in the United States of too much food than of too little."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Several times I concluded that there was too much detail; always I returned to continue and enjoy the book."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"War remains the decisive human failure."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?"
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"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."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"Intellects whose desires have outstripped their understanding."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"The mind cannot foresee its own advance."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call, somewhat misleadingly, an equilibrium will establish itself: but we never know what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to bring about such an equilibrium."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?"
Friedrich August von Hayek
"Yet, as I am anxious to repeat, we will still achieve predictions which can be falsified and which therefore are of empirical significance."
Friedrich August von Hayek
"A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind."
John Maynard Keynes
"Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be."
John Maynard Keynes
"By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."
John Maynard Keynes
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
John Maynard Keynes
"Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent."
John Maynard Keynes
"For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still."
John Maynard Keynes ", "I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past."
John Maynard Keynes
"I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal."
John Maynard Keynes
"Ideas shape the course of history."
John Maynard Keynes
"If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid."
John Maynard Keynes
"In the long run we are all dead."
John Maynard Keynes
"In the long run, we're all dead."
John Maynard Keynes
"It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative."
John Maynard Keynes
"It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."
John Maynard Keynes
"Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated."
John Maynard Keynes
"Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older."
John Maynard Keynes
"Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own."
John Maynard Keynes
"Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others."
John Maynard Keynes
"The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward."
John Maynard Keynes
"The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."
John Maynard Keynes
"The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion."
John Maynard Keynes
"The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods."
John Maynard Keynes
"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds."
John Maynard Keynes
"The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future."
John Maynard Keynes
"The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future."
John Maynard Keynes
"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking."
John Maynard Keynes
"A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted."
Thomas Malthus
"A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him."
Thomas Malthus
"Among plants and animals are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice."
Thomas Malthus
"During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand."
Thomas Malthus
"Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents."
Thomas Malthus
"Few persons will leave their families, connections, friends, and native land, to seek a settlement in untried foreign climes, without some strong subsisting causes of uneasiness where they are, or the hope of some great advantages in the place to which they are going."
Thomas Malthus
"Hard as it may appear in individual cases, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful."
Thomas Malthus
"I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candour."
Thomas Malthus
"I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food."
Thomas Malthus
"I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society with great pleasure."
Thomas Malthus
"I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see them completely removed."
Thomas Malthus
"I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth."
Thomas Malthus
"If I saw a glass of wine repeatedly presented to a man, and he took no notice of it, I should be apt to think that he was blind or uncivil."
Thomas Malthus
"In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known."
Thomas Malthus
"In no state that we have yet known has the power of population been left to exert itself with perfect freedom."
Thomas Malthus
"It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment."
Thomas Malthus
"It must be acknowledged that we are all of us too prone to err."
Thomas Malthus
"No check whatever has existed to early marriages, among the lower classes, from a fear of not providing well for their families, or among the higher classes, from a fear of lowering their condition in life."
Thomas Malthus
"No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase forever."
Thomas Malthus
"Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio."
Thomas Malthus
"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio."
Thomas Malthus
"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio."
Thomas Malthus
"Reason interrupts man's career and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world for whom he cannot provide the means of subsistence."
Thomas Malthus
"The advocate for the perfectibility of man, and of society, retorts on the defender of establishments a more than equal contempt."
Thomas Malthus
"The cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land, to turn up fresh soil."
Thomas Malthus
"The constant effort towards population, which is found even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased."
Thomas Malthus
"The farmers and capitalists are growing rich from the real cheapness of labour. Their increased capitals enable them to employ a greater number of men."
Thomas Malthus
"The friend of the present order of things condemns all political speculations in the gross."
Thomas Malthus
"The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years."
Thomas Malthus
"The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years have all concurred to lead many men into the opinion that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes."
Thomas Malthus
"The great question is whether man shall start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement, or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery."
Thomas Malthus
"The histories of mankind are histories only of the higher classes."
Thomas Malthus
"The histories of mankind that we possess are histories only of the higher classes."
Thomas Malthus
"The main peculiarity which distinguishes man from other animals is the means of his support-the power which he possesses of very greatly increasing these means."
Thomas Malthus
"The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil."
Thomas Malthus
"The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same, that it may always be considered, in algebraic language as a given quantity."
Thomas Malthus
"The passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state."
Thomas Malthus
"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man."
Thomas Malthus
"The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor."
Thomas Malthus
"The speculative philosopher offends against the cause of truth."
Thomas Malthus
"The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice."
Thomas Malthus
"The tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population."
Thomas Malthus
"Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand."
Thomas Malthus
"We are now supposing the existence of a society where vice is scarcely known."
Thomas Malthus
"Wherever there is liberty, the power of increase is exerted, and the superabundant effects are repressed afterwards by want of room and nourishment."
Thomas Malthus
"Whether the law of marriage be instituted or not, the dictate of nature and virtue seems to be an early attachment to one woman."
Thomas Malthus
"Again, most of the chief distinctions marked by economic terms are differences not of kind but of degree."
Alfred Marshall
"All labour is directed towards producing some effect."
Alfred Marshall
"Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth."
Alfred Marshall
"Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money."
Alfred Marshall
"Consumption may be regarded as negative production."
Alfred Marshall
"Economics has as its purpose firstly to acquire knowledge for its own sake, and secondly to throw light on practical issues. But though we are bound, before entering on any study, to consider carefully what are its uses, we should not plan out our work with direct reference to them."
Alfred Marshall
"Producer's Surplus is a convenient name for the genus of which the rent of land is the leading species."
Alfred Marshall
"Above, far above the prejudices and passions of men soar the laws of nature. Eternal and immutable, they are the expression of the creative power they represent what is, what must be, what otherwise could not be. Man can come to understand the: he is incapable of changing them."
Vilfredo Pareto
"Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."
Vilfredo Pareto
"Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty."
Adam Smith
"All money is a matter of belief."
Adam Smith
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
Adam Smith
"Defense is superior to opulence."
Adam Smith
"Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse."
Adam Smith
"Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man."
Adam Smith
"I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."
Adam Smith
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
Adam Smith
"Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased."
Adam Smith
"Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another."
Adam Smith
"Mankind are animals that makes bargains, no other animal does this."
Adam Smith
"On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity."
Adam Smith
"Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence."
Adam Smith
"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition."
Adam Smith
"The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals."
Adam Smith
"The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster."
Adam Smith
"The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation."
Adam Smith
"This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts."
Adam Smith
"To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation that is governed by shopkeepers."
Adam Smith
"What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?"
Adam Smith
"Business money is limitless."
Muhammad Yunus
"But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities."
Muhammad Yunus
"From the beginning, I had complained about the banking system on two grounds. One complaint was that the banking system was denying financial services to the poor people through certain rules it had set up. The second allegation was that the banking system also was not treating women fairly."
Muhammad Yunus
"Here we were talking about economic development, about investing billions of dollars in various programs, and I could see it wasn't billions of dollars people needed right away."
Muhammad Yunus
"I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh."
Muhammad Yunus
"I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked."
Muhammad Yunus
"I saw how people suffered for a tiny amount of money. They had to borrow from the moneylender, and the moneylender took advantage of them, squeezed them in a way that all the benefits passed on to the moneylender and none remained for the borrowers."
Muhammad Yunus
"I wanted to give money to people like this woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them - which was much higher than what the trader was giving them."
Muhammad Yunus
"I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation."
Muhammad Yunus
"I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over."
Muhammad Yunus
"If you look at the gender composition of all the borrowers of all the banks in Bangladesh, not even 1% of the borrowers happen to be women."
Muhammad Yunus
"My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see."
Muhammad Yunus
"Poverty is unnecessary."
Muhammad Yunus
"Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women."
Muhammad Yunus
"There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences."
Muhammad Yunus
"They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy."
Muhammad Yunus
"This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty."
Muhammad Yunus
"Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame."
Muhammad Yunus"
