Economics Quotes

The use of mathematics has brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it has also brought mortis.

No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.

The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.

There is no more certain way to deter employment than to harass and penalize employers.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

I don't think you can spend yourself rich.

Men will not always die quietly.

Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject.

We now know that anything which is economically right is also morally right. There can be no conflict between good economics and good morals.

Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.

Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The greatest picture is not yet painted, the greatest play isn't written, the greatest poem is unsung. There isn't in all the world a perfect railroad, nor a good government, nor a sound law. Physics, mathematics, and especially the most advanced and exact of the sciences are being fundamentally revised. . . Psychology, economics, and sociology are awaiting a Darwin, whose work in turn is awaiting an Einstein.

economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.

The only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets.

As a manager the important thing is not what happens when you are there, but what happens when you are not there

Your role as a leader is even more important than you might imagine. You have the power to help people become winners.

Things done well and with a care, exempt themselves from fear.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man

There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.

Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.

Improve your business, your life, your relationships, your finances and your health. When you do the whole world improves.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics.

The "human condition" is always to push forward for the better and economics is the study of that process.

Each step in life has been another step in an area that was a challenge, that is highly satisfying and that gives you a great sense of pride afterwards.

He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.

Mathematical economics is old enough to be respectable, but not all economists respect it. It has powerful supporters and impressive testimonials, yet many capable economists deny that mathematics, except as a shorthand or expository device, can be applied to economic reasoning. There have even been rumors that mathematics is used in economics (and in other social sciences) either for the deliberate purpose of mystification or to confer dignity upon common places as French was once used in diplomatic communications.

Finance that only talks to itself & deals with each other becomes socially useless

We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.

Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

On Positive Liberty: The business of the State is to use its organizing powers for the purpose of furnishing the necessary conditions which allow this people freely to unfold its creative faculties.

I admit that these terms and the diagrams connected with them repel some readers, and fill others with the vain imagination that they have mastered difficult economics problems, when really they have done little more than learn the language in which parts of those problems can be expressed, and the machinery by which they can be handled. When the actual conditions of particular problems have not been studied, such knowledge is little better than a derrick for sinking oil-wells erected where there are no oil-bearing strata.

Some of the most serious fallacies of traditional economics have been due to confusion between optimum and equilibrium conditions; the apparent influence of Dr. Pangloss upon the development of economic thought is for the most part nothing but pure intellectual error.

When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.

A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

Whoever claims that economic competition represents survival of the fittest in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics.

Why should a financial engineer be paid four, four times... to a hundred times more than the, uh... real engineer? A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build, build dreams. And when those dream turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it.

The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.

Do you realize that the 850 billion dollar bank bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA. And so when someone says, 'We don't have enough money for this space probe.' No, it's not that you don't have enough money. It's that the distribution of money that you're spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

We have one asset, and that's people.

I passionately disagreed with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's plan to bail out the banks by using a public fund called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help banks take toxic assets off their balance sheets. I argued that it would be much better to put the money where the hole was and replenish the equity of the banks themselves.

Thirty years ago, about 80% of a company's assets resided in its plant and equipment, with 20% in the knowledge of its people. Today, the reverse is true. The knowledge of our staff is our principal asset

What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

I am opposed to all forms of control; I am for an absolute laissez faire, free, unregulated economy. I am for the separation of the state and economics, just as we had separation of state and church, which led to peaceful coexistence among different religions...so the same applies to economics. If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, and harmony and justice among men.

Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -- and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.