Economics Quotes - Page 18

• You cannot go to sleep with one form of economic system and wake up the next morning with another.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Morning, Sleep, Next

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• A land ethic for tomorrow should...stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life.

  Stewart Udall

  Stress, Oneness, Land

  Stewart L. Udall (1963). “The Quiet Crisis”

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• Over the long haul of life on the planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.

  Stewart Udall

  Life, Business, Long

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• Sometime in the last ten years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something.

  Gary Snyder

  Discovery, Years, Brain

  Gary Snyder (1995). “A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds : New and Selected Prose”, Counterpoint LLC

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• Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Matter, Majority

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2012). “A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings”, p.76, Beacon Press

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• The average American family head will be forced to do twenty years' labor to pay taxes in his or her lifetime.

  James Bovard

  Average, Years, Liberty

  James Bovard (1995). “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty”, p.289, Palgrave Macmillan

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• I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds ... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.

  Grover Cleveland

  Indulge In, Liberty, Libertarian

  Grover Cleveland (1968). “Grover Cleveland, 1837-1908: Chronology, Documents, Bibliographical Aids”

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• It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Thinking, Mind, Doctrine

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• Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Facts, Needs, Computer

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• The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.

  Thomas Piketty

  Passion, Discipline, Historical

  "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". Book by Thomas Piketty, March 10, 2014.

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• We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions.

  Wassily Leontief

  Moving, Arbitrary, Assumption

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• Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world.

  Ronald Coase

  Real, Air, World

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• The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

  Paul Krugman

  Groups, Mathematics, Impressive

  "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?". www.nytimes.com. September 2, 2009.

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• Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.

  Milton Friedman

  Real, Branches, Problem

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• Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.

  Mark Blaug

  Games, Sick, Understanding

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• For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.

  Thomas Piketty

  Long, Use, Scientific Method

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• In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.

  Ronald Coase

  Silly, May, Youth

  "The Firm, the Market, and the Law (Note on the problem of social costs)". Book by Ronald Coase (p. 185), 1988.

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• Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Men, Unlikely, Economist

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• We see community organizations as major service providers and economic drivers rather than as recipients or distributors of charity, and coordinators of volunteers. Today they constitute what's referred to as 'the social economy'.

  Julia Gillard

  Organization, Volunteer, Community

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• It's an awful stretcher to believe that a peacock's tail was thus formed but ... most people just don't get it - I must be a very bad explainer

  Charles Darwin

  Believe, People, Tails

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• There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved

  Charles Darwin

  Beautiful, Simple, Views

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• The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died

  Daniel Dennett

  Alternatives, Answers, Chains

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• In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless.

  Daniel Dennett

  Beautiful, Order, Perfect

  "Cute, sexy, sweet, funny". TED conference, www.ted.com. 2009.

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• Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind

  Richard Dawkins

  Survival, Evolution, Blind

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• The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Essentials, Creative Destruction, Process

  Joseph A. Schumpeter (2013). “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, p.82, Routledge

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