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"

"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"

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

"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"

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

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

"The real minimum wage is zero"

"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"

"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"

"Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated"

"People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes"

"People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do"

"One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring"

"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them"

"Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats"

"Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good"

"Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision"

"Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them"