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Quotes by Economist
"Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas."
106
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."
79
"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."
46
"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."
41
"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."
40
"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."
39
"Since, however, the reduced surplus value is to be distributed among them in like manner, the modification of their respective parts in the production of surplus value must find expression in a modification of the prices."
37
"The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations."
37
"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."
36
"The Holocaust committed by the Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important."
35
"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."
35
"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."
35
"There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits."
34
"I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over."
34
"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."
33
"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."
31
"By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."
30
"A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets."
29
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."
26
"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."
25
"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything."
23
"Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation."
23
"They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy."
22
"The increase in inequality in income is a longtime trend, but the pressure on middle- and low-income workers is going up rapidly. Especially if they live in an area where there are high housing and gas prices, like California."
21
"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."
20
"I recognized that information was, in many respects, like a public good, and it was this insight that made it clear to me that it was unlikely that the private market would provide efficient resource allocations whenever information was endogenous."
19
"Inflation is taxation without legislation."
17
"Dull would be the man who should merely tolerate this plan of social industry. Weak would be the position of him who should take an apologetic tone in defending it, or present its claims in a merely negative way, by exposing the evils and perils of the socialistic plan."
17
"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."
16
"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."
16
"Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience."
15
"When the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over."
15
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