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Quotes by Economist
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."
64
"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."
32
"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."
31
"The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations."
31
"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."
31
"Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas."
29
"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."
28
"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."
28
"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."
27
"I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over."
26
"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."
25
"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."
24
"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."
22
"A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets."
21
"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."
21
"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."
21
"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."
20
"They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy."
18
"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything."
16
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."
15
"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."
15
"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."
13
"There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits."
12
"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
11
"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."
9
"Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product."
9
"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."
8
"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."
8
"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
8
"A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence."
8
"Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it."
8
"You can't inspire people if you are going to be uninspiring."
7
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."
7
"For me, socialism has always been about liberty and solidarity, but also about responsibility."
7
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