top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Economist
"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."
22
"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."
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."
22
"The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor."
Poor,
21
"Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them."
21
"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."
21
"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man."
21
"Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another."
Man,
21
"If a commodity were in no way useful, - in other words, if it could in no way contribute to our gratification, - it would be destitute of exchangeable value, however scarce it might be, or whatever quantity of labour might be necessary to procure it."
21
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
20
"Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied."
Man,
20
"For me, socialism has always been about liberty and solidarity, but also about responsibility."
20
"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."
20
"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
20
"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."
19
"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."
19
"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
18
"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class."
18
"Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product."
18
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."
17
"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."
17
"On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity."
17
"It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."
17
"I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past."
17
"Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth."
17
"To find ways of practicing democracy, not ways of orating about it, is our great problem."
17
"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."
17
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
17
"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."
17
"The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo."
17
bottom of page