Quotes by Economists - Page 2

There can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself.
Henry George
Property is theft.
Proudhon
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes to increase luxury and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
Henry George
A half truth like half a brick is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.
Stephen Leacock
It is a fact of history that those who seek to withdraw from its great experiments usually end up being overwhelmed by them.
Barbara Ward
Power is the recognition of necessity.
Abraham Rotstein
That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature but to the injustice of man.
Henry George
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people: it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
Walter Bagehot
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.
J. K. Galbraith
Poverty is less a matter of income than of prospects. While the incomes of the poor have steadily risen through Great Society largesse their prospects have plummeted as families have broken into dependent fragments.
George Gilder
What we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
Karl Marx
If a man didn't make sense the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.
J. K. Galbraith
The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.
Beatrice Potter Webb
I have never understood why one's affections must be confined as once with women to a single country.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Many a man in love with a dimple makes a mistake of marrying the whole girl.
Stephen Leacock
Times of stress and difficulty are seasons of opportunity when the seeds of progress are sown.
Thomas F. Woodlock
The successful man is one who had the chance and took it.
Roger Babson
Life we learn too late is in the living in the tissue of every day and hour.
Stephen Leacock
Born in inquity and conceived in sin the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
Thorstein Veblen
Money never remains just coins and pieces of paper. Money can be translated into the beauty of living a support in misfortune an education or future security.
Sylvia Porter
Lose an hour in the morning and you will be all day hunting for it.
Richard Whately
To act without rapacity to use knowledge with wisdom to respect interdependence to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.
Barbara Ward
Inflation is determined by money supply growth.
Roger Bootle
Of all the girls that are so smart There's none like pretty Sally She is the darling of my heart And lives in our alley.
Henry Carey
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
Stephen Leacock
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Stephen Leacock
Life we learn too late is in the living in the tissue of every day and hour.
Stephen Leacock
The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
Population when unchecked increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.
Thomas Robert Malthus
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
John Stuart Mill
For as labor cannot produce without the use of land the denial of the equal right to use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce.
Henry George
Journalism has already come to be the first power in the land.
Samuel Bowles
The worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.
John Stuart Mill
There is less leisure now than in the Middle Ages when one third of the year consisted of holidays and festivals.
Ralph Borsodi
Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.
Stephen Leacock
You encourage a comic man too much and he gets silly.
Stephen Leacock
Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.
Stephen Leacock
The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.
Stephen Leacock
Humour is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention. But it has no persuasive value at all.
J. K. Galbraith
The forgotten man. He is the clean quiet virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of outside his little circle. ... He works he votes generally he prays but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner
Man an animal that makes bargains.
Adam Smith
Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed the only animal that is never satisfied.
Henry George
The economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that all events are determined solely by economic forces. It simply means that economic facts are the ever recurring decisive forces the chief points in the process of history.
Edward Bernstein
I never realized that there was history close at hand beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.
Stephen Leacock
A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good but for neglecting his neighbor's.
Richard Whately
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
John Stuart Mill
Unquestionably it is possible to do without happiness it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.
John Stuart Mill
Ask yourself whether you are happy and you will cease to be so.
John Stuart Mill
What can be added to the happiness of man who is in health out of debt and has a clear conscience?
Adam Smith
The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.
John Stuart Mill
He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.
John Stuart Mill
His eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding landscape.
John Stuart Mill
I'm a great believer in luck. I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
Stephen Leacock
No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.
J. K. Galbraith
The best reason why monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government: the mass of mankind understand it and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.
Walter Bagehot
The state it cannot too often be repeated does nothing and can give nothing which it does not take from somebody.
Henry George
Inflation is one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
Milton Friedman
It is the aim of good government to stimulate production of bad government to encourage consumption.
Jean Baptiste Say