Economics Quotes

The basic idea that if you increase government spending or you cut people's taxes that stimulates th...

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with...

The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:a...

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability t...

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, r...

The world is better served by syncretic economists and policymakers who can hold multiple ideas in t...

If economics were only about profit maximization, it would be just another name for business adminis...

The economics we need is of the "seminar room" variety, not the "rule-of-thumb" kind. It is an econo...

Many individuals are doing what they can. But real success can only come if there is a change in our...

If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should thi...

IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of huma...

This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like...

At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves ...

Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition,...

Fierce, and what capitalists sometimes call 'ruinous' competition tends, therefore, to produce leap-...

Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties lea...

We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.

To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way a...

We must achieve both security and solvency. In fact, the foundation of military strength is economic...

Most of us are pseudo-scholars...for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Chur...

Whatever Latin America sells—raw materials or manufactures—its chief export product is really cheap ...

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is ...

Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who i...

Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who i...

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions...

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption f...

It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of...

Two mystic states can be dissociated: the ecstatic-beneficent-and-benevolent, contemplation of the d...

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

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part o...

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men befor...

Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its...

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economic...

Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to...

It is a curious thought that the earliest description of the steam-engine in antiquity describes its...

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from...

If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements...

The profit of the one is the profit of the other.

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an acti...

The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son ha...

I can never look at these apparent contradictions between the great laws of nature without a feeling...

We need not be surprised at this. On a wrong road, inconsistency is inevitable; if it were not so, m...

But things have been so admirably arranged by the Divine inventor of social order that in this, as i...

If the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is because the social sys...

Modern prophets say that our economics have failed us. No! It is not our economics which have failed...

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping ...

Their job as leader was not to solve the problem – the president really has little control over the ...

The problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all econ...

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whethe...

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the...

Monopoly is a market, or part of a market, reserved to the exclusive possession of one or more selle...

It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should...

In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear. Ours was a nest of conce...

War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security...

After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleash...

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Economics should be defined in terms of what it is about. It should be about how people produce thin...

If the world were full of the self-seeking individuals found in economics textbooks, it would grind ...

Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective...

Since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would crea...

Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for ...

The issue of false consciousness is a genuinely difficult problem that has no definite solution. We ...

Economics is a political argument. It is not – and can never be – a science; there are no objective ...

I would go one step further and say that the willingness to challenge professional economists - and ...

95% of economics is common sense

The life of man is so short that ordinary people simply cannot afford to be born

Experience cannot beat logic, and interpretations of observational evidence which are not in line wi...

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle,...

Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of soc...

If we try to run the economy for the benefit of a single group or class, we shall injure or destroy ...

The demoralization that the debase­ment of the currency left in its wake played a major role in brin...

To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like tr...

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The i...

ECONOMICS IS HAUNTED by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The i...

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is f...

need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing ...

Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full product...

This is perhaps as good a place as any to point out that what distinguishes many reformers from thos...

For every dollar that is spent on the (boondoggle) bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers...

There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering...

It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of St...

As the several items can be exchanged, they must be equal; but in what terms? Not in pounds, yards, ...

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach ...

In arguing against free enterprise capitalism, the collectivist always adopts the false assumption o...

In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemploymen...

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechan...

Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the lik...

In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time ex...

Our market-intensive societies measure material progress by the increase in the volume and variety o...

In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument ...

All governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize t...

The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can atta...

Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or e...

When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the b...

I was reading in the paper today that Congress wants to replace the dollar bill with a coin. They’ve...