Quotes by Economists - Page 4

The Lord said 'let there be wheat' and Saskatchewan was born.
Stephen Leacock
At eighty-eight how do you feel when getting up in the morning? . . . Amazed!
Ludwig von Mises
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
Kenneth Boulding
Never argue at the dinner table for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.
Richard Whately
Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.
J. K. Galbraith
The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
Stephen Leacock
Nothing ever gets settled in this town (Washington). It's not like running a company or even a university. It's a seething debating society in which the debate never stops in which people never give up including me and that's the atmosphere in which you administer.
George P. Shultz
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
J. K. Galbraith
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock
Times of stress and difficulty are seasons of opportunity when the seeds of progress are sown.
Thomas F. Woodlock
Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them and know it but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.
William Graham Sumner
When actors begin to think it is time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
Stephen Leacock
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
Hazel Henderson
We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.
Alexander Hamilton
Every Moment of your life is a new Page in your Book. Some Sentences you can’t change, even whole Pages. But you decide how your Book ends.
John M. Eaton
One cannot fail to notice the inconsistency of those rejecting human rights: their rejection takes place in the public square created by human rights. It is difficult to reject human rights without using them.
Filip Spagnoli
Whenever people talk in the abstract about the pros and cons of immigration, one should not forget that immigrants are individual human beings whose lives happen not to fit neatly within national borders – and that like all human beings, they are all different.How different, though? Different better, or different worse? Such basic questions underlie whether people are willing to accept outsiders in their midst
Philippe Legrain
In every country the intellectual class is the most influential class. This is the class which can foresee advice and lead. In no country does the mass of the people live the life for intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class. There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destination of the country depends upon its intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest and independent, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises. It is true that the intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means and the use of a means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support.
B.R. Ambedkar
Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
Thomas Sowell
If there are any persons who contest a received opinion,or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thankthem for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoicethat there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought,if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality ofour convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.
John Stuart Mill
No one but a fool, and only a fool of a peculiar description, feels offended by the acknowledgment that there are others whose opinion, and even whose wish, is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his.
John Stuart Mill
... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.
Max Weber
Humans are mortal. So are ideas. An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering. Otherwise both will wither and die.
B.R. Ambedkar
A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.
B.R. Ambedkar
Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies Government.
B.R. Ambedkar
As for me, I prefer truth to goodthink. I feel surer on my ground.
David S. Landes
I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.
B.R. Ambedkar
When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.
Steven D. Levitt
Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.
Steven D. Levitt
Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.
Steven D. Levitt
Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present. 
Roger W. Babson
More dangerous than bayonets and cannon are the weapons of the mind.
Ludwig von Mises
Most economic histories of the "world" not only omit most extra-European production and exchange (even most of that outside West Europe or even northwest Europe); they neglect the participation of the productive and exchange activities of extra-European countries in the European, not to say world, process of accumulation and development. Moreover, they disregard the part that these productive and exchange relations played in the developing world system.
André Gunder Frank
The crisis is a period in which a diseased social, economic, and political body or system cannot live on as before and is obliged, on pain of death, to undergo transformations that will give it a new lease on life. Therefore, this period of crisis is a historical moment of danger and suspense during which the crucial decisions and transformations are made, which will determine the future development of the system if any and its new social, economic, and political basis.
André Gunder Frank
Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
... money should not be spent according to what the West considers the most dramatic kind of suffering.
William Easterly
The present presses automatically on you. The future does not. To attend to the future requires bandwidth, which scarcity taxes. When scarcity taxes our bandwidth, we become even more focused on the here and now. We need cognitive resources to gauge future needs, and we need executive control to resist present temptations. As it taxes our bandwidth, scarcity focuses on the present, and leads us to borrow.
Sendhil Mullainathan
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
In the first place, it would efface from everybody’sconscience the distinction between justice and injustice.No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a cer-tain degree, but the safest way to make them respected isto make them respectable. When law and morality are incontradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself inthe cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or oflosing his respect for the law—two evils of equal magni-tude, between which it would be difficult to choose.
Frédéric Bastiat
We really don’t get all the government we pay for, and thank goodness. Lord protect us on the day that we do.
Jeffrey Tucker
The government never minds having more power, and is always prepared to paper over the problems it creates. An economy not bludgeoned by powerful elites is the ideal we should seek, even if it has a name that is wildly unpopular: capitalism
Jeffrey Tucker
As regards the social apparatus of repression and coercion, the government, there cannot be any question of freedom. Government is essentially the negation of liberty. It is the recourse to violence or threat of violence in order to make all people obey the orders of the government, whether they like it or not. As far as the government’s jurisdiction extends, there is coercion, not freedom. Government is a necessary institution, the means to make the social system of cooperation work smoothly without being disturbed by violent acts on the part of gangsters whether of domestic or of foreign origin. Government is not, as some people like to say, a necessary evil; it is not an evil, but a means, the only means available to make peaceful human coexistence possible. But it is the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging. Whatever a government does it is ultimately supported by the actions of armed constables.
Ludwig von Mises
The market economy is delivering miracles by the minute and yet we hardly notice or care; worse, we denounce the realization of this dream of all of history, this coming of heaven on earth and call it decadent and dangerous.
Jeffrey Tucker
MY THESIS, in simplest terms, is: Let anyone do anything he pleases, so long as it is peaceful; the role of government, then, is to keep the peace...Keeping the peace means no more than prohibiting persons from unpeaceful actions...When government goes beyond this, that is, when government prohibits peaceful actions, such prohibitions themselves are, prima facie, unpeaceful.
Leonard Edward Read
I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R'. And I am a Republican with a capital 'R' on grounds of expediency, not on principle.
Milton Friedman
Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted is infused throughout the mass. The one strikes the eye at a first glance, while the other becomes perceptible only to close investigation.
Frédéric Bastiat
The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.
Murray N. Rothbard
Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check.
Murray N. Rothbard
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.
John Stuart Mill
Unemployment or the loss of income which will always affect some in any society is certainly less degrading if it is the result of misfortune and not deliberately imposed by authority.
Friedrich A. Hayek
While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us. Dissatisfaction of everybody with his lot will inevitably grow with the consciousness that it is the result of deliberate human decision.
Friedrich A. Hayek
I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost:Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothI took the one less travled by,And that has made all the difference.As I recalled my own experience and development, I was impressed by the series of lucky accidents that determined the road I traveled.> From "Lives of the Laureates" pg.67
Milton Friedman
The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.
Karl Marx
However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.
Daniel Kahneman
...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...
Herbert A. Simon
The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.
Daniel Kahneman
Beautiful, seamless upgrade from Twitter today, making functionality smoother and cooler. We didn't have to lobby, didn't have to beg, didn't have to elect a new leader, didn't have to push or protest. Progress is built in to the structure of the mechanism itself: this company exists to please you and me. This is a far better system than any political system on earth.
Jeffrey Tucker
When politics and home life have become one and the same, when economic problems have been solved in such a way that individual and collective interests are identical – all constraints having disappeared – it is evident that we will be in a state of total liverty or anarchy.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon