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"

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

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

"The real minimum wage is zero"

"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?"

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today"

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

"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"

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

"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"

"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"

"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism"

"If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win"

"Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric"

"Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities"

"Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders"

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late"

"Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it"

"Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights"