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Quotes by Economist
"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
"It came as a surprise to find that a professional society and journal (Econometrica) were flourishing, and I entered this area of study with great enthusiasm."
35
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
35
"All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage."
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
"Most important, I have learned from my colleagues and students."
34
"Profits might also increase, because improvements might take place in agriculture, or in the implements of husbandry, which would augment the produce with the same cost of production."
34
"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man."
34
"The funds from the sale were put into research and general teaching budgets at the university. Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, Inc., is now a growing enterprise with many model and other econometric facilities."
34
"If the possessor of a units of money receives h additional units, then it is not at all true to say that he will value the total stock a + h exactly as highly as he had previously valued the stock a alone. Because he now has disposal over a larger stock, he will now value each unit less than he did before; but how much less will depend upon a whole series of individual circumstances, upon subjective valuations that will be different for each individual."
34
"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing."
34
"The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing soundeconomic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit ofthis task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and charlatanswhose shortcuts to an earthly paradise he debunks. The less these quacks are able toadvance plausible objections to an economist's argument, the more furiously do theyinsult them."
34
"Have your one good cry, pick your chin up, smile, and move on to the positive."
34
"A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better."
33
"Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated."
33
"To find ways of practicing democracy, not ways of orating about it, is our great problem."
33
"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."
33
"Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital."
33
"The first value of money was clearly the value which the goods used as money possessed (thanks to their suitability for satisfying human wants in other ways) at the moment when they were first used as common media of exchange."
33
"True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going."
33
"As soon, however, as capitalist competition has definitively established the equal rate of profit, that rate becomes the starting point for the calculations of the capitalists in the investment of capital in newly-created branches of production."
33
"I see a vision, its the vision of tomorrow,no force can stop it from manifesting, not even the sun nor the moon."
33
"Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse."
32
"We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?"
32
"I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past."
32
"A laborer no longer makes whole articles. He receives raw materials, puts his touch on them, and passes them to another worker in the series. When the articles are quite finished they are carried out of sight by currents of commercial exchange. These currents are untraceable."
32
"The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is."
32
"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."
32
"Although I was not aware of it at the time, the experience of growing up during the Great Depression was to have a profound impact on my intellectual and professional career."
32
"Experience alone can give a final answer. The knowledge gained in a few years by a commission of the kind suggested would be worth more than volumes of mere assertions and contradictions."
32
"If all the exchange-ratios of the past were erased from human memory, the process of market-price-determination might certainly become more difficult, because everybody would have to construct a new scale of valuations for himself; but it would not become impossible. In fact, people the whole world over are engaged daily and hourly in the operation from which all prices result: the decision as to the relative significance enjoyed by specific quantities of goods as conditions for the satisfaction of wants."
32
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