Famous quotes by Economists

"Material loss can be made up through renewed labor, but the moral wrong which has been inflicted upon the conquered peoples, in the peace dictates, leaves a burning scar on the people's conscience"

"Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them"

"Domestic inflation reflects domestic monetary policy"

"There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits"

"The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers"

"After all the fertile land in the immediate neighbourhood of the first settlers were cultivated, if capital and population increased, more food would be required, and it could only be procured from land not so advantageously situated"

"I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation"

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone"

"The only way that we're going to feel secure in this country again and that we're going to feel good about ourselves is if we use these systems we've put into place to create positive change around the world. I really believe we can do that"

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else"

"We've built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort"

"The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm"

"Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does"

"During the early 1960s, I decided to supplement research support for quantitative economic studies at Pennsylvania by selling econometric forecasts to private and public sector buyers"

"And for man to look upon himself as a capital good, even if it did not impair his freedom, may seem to debase him... by investing in themselves, people can enlarge the range of choice available to them. It is one way free men can enhance their welfare"

"Funeral by funeral, theory advances"

"There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences"

"I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis"

"What we're talking about is the price of goods, all goods, in terms of money. That has nothing to do with unemployment, except for the fact that you get fewer goods. And when you have more money and fewer goods, the amount of dollars per good goes up. It goes up because there are fewer goods and it goes up because there is more money"

"The Nobel Prize is given as a personal award but it also honors the field of research in which I have worked and it also honors my students and colleagues"

"I still have my original social security card signed when I was 13"

"But ultimately what I was impressed by during my years in government was how much the intellectual climate and the prevailing intellectual notions constrained and represented the universe within which the discourse took place"

"How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?"

"War... is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror"

"The Treatise tries to analyze not only modern Western families, but also those in other cultures and the changes in family structure during the past several centuries"

"The market tends to pay as a wage what an individual laborer is worth. But the case last studied suggests the question how accurately the law operates in practice. May it not be an honest law, but be so vitiated in its working as to give a dishonest result?"

"I started working and publishing in price theory by 1938"

"Globalization was a deep trend pushed by technology and right ideas, as much as anything else"

"Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently"

"The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens"