Famous quotes by Economists

"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything"

"It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work"

"Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility"

"If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters"

"You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need"

"The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology"

"The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is"

"Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market"

"Many people love in themselves what they hate in others"

"There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young"

"The real minimum wage is zero"

"Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty"

"Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?"

"The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best"

"I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said"

"Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country"

"Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer"

"Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes"

"An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited"

"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long"

"What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture"

"Too much of what is called "education" is little more than an expensive isolation from reality"

"There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously"

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing"

"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive"

"The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them"

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics"

"Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved"

"Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens"

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it"