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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."
149
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."
103
"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."
70
"Inflation is taxation without legislation."
57
"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."
54
"Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard."
52
"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."
51
"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."
51
"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."
48
"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."
47
"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."
47
"The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations."
47
"There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits."
47
"I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over."
47
"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."
45
"The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department."
45
"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."
44
"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."
44
"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."
42
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."
38
"A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets."
36
"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."
36
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."
34
"By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."
34
"They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy."
33
"Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation."
28
"Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience."
27
"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything."
27
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
27
"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."
26
"He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech."
25
"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."
25
"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."
24
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