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Quotes by Economist
"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything."
47
"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."
46
"The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor."
Poor,
45
"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."
42
"The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it."
42
"Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?"
Self,
41
"The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil."
40
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."
40
"On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity."
40
"Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth."
40
"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."
40
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
38
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
38
"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."
38
"A FAILED RESOLUTION IS NOT THE FAULT OF RESOLUTIONS."
38
"There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously."
37
"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."
37
"Well, by the standards of a lot of countries, by Latin American standards, it wasn't so bad."
37
"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."
36
"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."
36
"My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best."
36
"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."
36
"It used to be said that when the U.S. sneezed, the world caught a cold. The opposite is equally true today."
35
"There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit."
35
"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
35
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
35
"But my shift to the serious study of economics gradually weakened my belief in Major Douglas's A+B theorem, which was replaced in my thought by the expression MV = PT."
35
"The market tends to pay as a wage what an individual laborer is worth. But the case last studied suggests the question how accurately the law operates in practice. May it not be an honest law, but be so vitiated in its working as to give a dishonest result?"
34
"It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."
34
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