Economy And Economics Quotes

Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.

No one is rich whose expenditures exceed his means, and no one is poor whose incomings exceed his outgoings.

I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes.

Be thrifty, but not covetous.

How great, my friends, is the virtue of living upon a little!

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

Few are sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why, except for some special reason, read an inferior book, at the very time you might be reading one of the highest order?

No one spends someone elses money as carefully as he spends his own.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.

Economy is too late when you are at the bottom of your purse.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

Economy is the method by which we prepare today to afford the improvements of tomorrow.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.

According to the Bank of England the economy is growing too fast so interest rates must rise to counter the supposed inflationary threat.

According to the Bank of England the economy is growing too fast so interest rates must rise to counter the supposed inflationary threat. In lay terms, I interpret this to mean that people are working much harder, causing economic growth, and they're in danger of spending their money, which is what the recession-hit shops want them to do. But the Bank and the City seem to think this is wrong, and that if people work harder they should be punished by having their mortgages increased.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Has anyone stopped to consider that we might come closer to balancing the budget if all of us simply tried to live up to the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule?

I learned more about the economy from one South Dakota dust storm that I did in all my years of college.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

I would never make a good economist. You know, an economist is a man that can tell you anything about — well, he will tell you what can happen under any given condition — and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's, too.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals.

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.

First rule of Economics 101: our desires are insatiable. Second rule: we can stomach only three Big Macs at a time.

Never spend your money before you have earned it.

Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.