Economist Quotes - Page 2

• In the long run we are all dead.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Funny, Death, Running

  A Tract on Monetary Reform ch. 3 (1923)

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• Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Thinking, People, Watches

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• Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other.

  Harry S. Truman

  Business, Hands, Giving

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• An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Sarcastic, Sarcasm, Economics

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• This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Death, Running, Ocean

  1923 A Tract on Monetary Reform.

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• No nation was ever ruined by trade.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Business, Liberty, Libertarian

  Benjamin Franklin, William-Temple Franklin (1818). “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of (the Same), Continued to the Time of His Death by William Temple Franklin. - London, H. Colburn 1818”, p.157

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• Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Running, Long, Affair

  A Tract on Monetary Reform ch. 3 (1923)

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• In view of the importance of philanthropy in our society, it is surprising that so little attention has been given to it by economic or social theorists. In economic theory, especially, the subject is almost completely ignored. This is not, I think, because economists regard mankind as basically selfish or even because economic man is supposed to act only in his self-interest; it is rather because economics has essentially grown up around the phenomenon of exchange and its theoretical structure rests heavily on this process.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Selfish, Men, Thinking

  "Notes on a Theory of Philanthropy". "Philanthropy and Public Policy", edited by Frank G. Dickinson, 1962.

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• There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Air, Firsts, Winner

  Autobiographical Essay for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, www.nobelprize.org. 2001.

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• The business of a Political Economist is neither to recommend nor to dissuade, but to state general principles, which it is fatal to neglect, but neither advisable, nor perhaps practicable, to use as the sole, or even the principal, guides in the actual conduct of affairs.

  Nassau William Senior

  Political, Principles, Use

  Nassau William Senior (1849). “Political economy”, p.3

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• The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.

  George Stigler

  Competition, Challenges, Citizens

  Nobel Banquet Speech, www.nobelprize.org. 1982.

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• Thirty years ago, many economists argued that inflation was a kind of minor inconvenience and that the cost of reducing inflation was too high a price to pay. No one would make those arguments today.

  Martin Feldstein

  Years, Cost, Pay

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• I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Country, Teaching, People

  "Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the World’s Poorest Citizens, Makes His Case". Interview with Linda O’Bryon, knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu. March 9, 2005.

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• A Swedish physicist can not discuss his work with fifty people unless he goes abroad. A Swedish economist can get opinions and instructions in his native language from thousands upon thousands of his fellow citizens.

  George Stigler

  Native Language, People, Citizens

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• In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.

  Peter Drucker

  Business, Worry, Meals

  "Business Wit & Wisdom". Book by Richard Zera, p. 60, en.wikiquote.org. March 31, 2005.

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• Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Intellectual, Mit, Development

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• The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Powerful, Freedom, Ideas

  General Theory of Employment (1936; 1947 ed.) ch. 24

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• But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

  Edmund Burke

  Birthday, Europe, Forever

  Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

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• The Communists were interested in getting into key positions as union officers, statisticians, economists, etc., in order to utilize the apparatus of the unions to promote the cause of revolution.

  John T. Flynn

  Keys, Order, Unions

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• A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Artist, Design, Synthesis

  R. Buckminster Fuller (2009). “Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure”, p.116, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• 

  If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

  Milton Friedman

  Government, Years, Political

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• Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.

  Rowan Williams

  Average, Littles, Poverty

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• I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Hands, Problem, Economy

  "A Conversation with Friedrich A. Von Hayek: Science and Socialism". Talk at American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C., 1979.

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• But if, if you take a look at what would have happened, I mean, do we need to see soup lines down the street to figure out what would have happened? We avoided - and all economists will tell you that millions of jobs were saved because of the Recovery Act, and we avoided a second Great Depression. That, that is a reality.

  Alexi Giannoulias

  Jobs, Recovery, Mean

  "Meet the Press" with David Gregory, www.nbcnews.com. October 10, 2010.

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• There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Differences, Accounts, Effects

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