Invisible Hand Quotes - Page 2

• The invisible hand never picks up the check.

  Kim Stanley

  Hands, Checks, Picks

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• Adam Smith is an egalitarian, he believed in equality of outcome, not opportunity. He is an enlightenment figure, pre-capitalist. He says, suppose in England, one landowner got most of the land and other people would have nothing to live on. He says it wouldn't matter much, because the rich land owner, by virtue of his sympathy for other people would distribute resources among them, so that by an invisible hand, we would end up with a pretty egalitarian society. That is his conception of human nature.

  Noam Chomsky

  Opportunity, Hands, Land

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• Something in my gut twisted so hard that it felt like I was being tickled by an invisible hand, and it took me a moment to realize what it was. Hope. It had been so long since I'd felt it that the sensation was like something living inside me, something wonderful waiting to break free, just like I was.

  Alexander Gordon Smith

  Hands, Long, Waiting

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• The self-organizing and self-correcting imprint is on all aspects of reality. So not only was your body formed by this invisible hand, not only does your body continue to work by this invisible hand, but every aspect of your life - emotionally, physiologically, and spiritually - is also programmed to thrive, is also programmed for self-organization and self-correction.

  Marianne Williamson

  Reality, Self, Hands

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• I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Thinking, Hands, Years

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• In practice, without appropriate government intervention, Smith's "invisible hand" dons brass knuckles and conducts gang warfare, creating fierce battles between competitors who would be more than happy to define and enforce their own private property interests according to their own subjective rules.

  Denise Caruso

  Government, Hands, Practice

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• While the invisible hand looks after the private sector, the invisible foot kicks the public sector to pieces.

  Herman E. Daly

  Hands, Feet, Looks

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• Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which-miraculously, it seems-merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.

  Arthur Koestler

  Fate, Destiny, Hands

  "Bricks to Babel". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1980.

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• Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Hands, Creative, Movement

  "Rupert Murdoch's inaugural Margaret Thatcher lecture" by Rupert Murdoch, www.theguardian.com. October 21, 2010.

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• When it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  Hands, Environment, Checks

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• What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy.

  Lawrence Summers

  Powerful, Views, Hands

  "The Commanding Heights". Book by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, 1998.

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• A few months ago people were talking about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Now the only hope is keeping the world economy from total deterioration. And you get a sense that it is all now truly left to Adam Smith's invisible hand--it's beyond any country's ability, and institution's ability to control.

  Jeffrey Garten

  Country, Hands, Talking

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• Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Destiny, Night, Hands

  Fernando Pessoa (1996). “The Book of Disquietude: By Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon”

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• [Margaret Thatcher] was the invisible hand behind it. Without that, there'd be no Trainspotting and no Filth.

  Irvine Welsh

  Hands, Trainspotting, Filth

  Source: thequietus.com

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• As the great naturalist Charles Darwin saw clearly, individual and collective interests often coincide, as in the invisible hand narrative. But he also saw that in many other cases, interests at the two levels are squarely in conflict, and that in those cases, individual interests generally trump. That simple observation suggests that market failure is often the result not of insufficient competition (the traditional charge from social critics on the Left), but of the very logic of competition itself.

  Bob Frank

  Simple, Two, Hands

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention

  Adam Smith

  Views, Hands, Employment

  Adam Smith (2017). “The Wealth of Nations (illustrated)”, p.330, Clap Publishing, LLC.

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• Americans have always pursued our dreams within a free market that has been the engine of our progress. It's a market that has created a prosperity that is the envy of the world, and rewarded the innovators and risk-takers who have made America a beacon of science, and technology, and discovery. But the American economy has worked in large part because we have guided the market's invisible hand with a higher principle - that America prospers when all Americans can prosper. That is why we have put in place rules of the road to make competition fair, and open, and honest.

  Barack Obama

  Dream, Technology, America

  "The Day the Momentum Changed: And What Obama Needs to Do in the Debates to Keep It" by Drew Westen, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 23, 2008.

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• The invisible hand is not perfect. Indeed, the invisible hand is a little bit arthritic ... I'm a believer in free markets, but I think we need to be less naïve. We need to accept that markets give us pretty good solutions, but occasionally they will lock in something inferior.

  W. Brian Arthur

  Thinking, Hands, Giving

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• Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.

  Tyler Cowen

  Hands, Effort, Pioneers

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• No people can be bound to acknowledge the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the united States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency

  George Washington

  Christian, Character, Independent

  George Washington (2011). “Washington's Political Legacies: With a Biographical Outline of His Life and Character”, p.58, Cambridge University Press

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• Images flicker, each one bringing its own sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst, an impenetrable and sightless black and at best, a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory if the sorrow it brings.

  Pittacus Lore

  Hurt, Memories, Eye

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• She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Grief, Night, Blue

  Jeffrey Eugenides (2011). “The Marriage Plot: A Novel”, p.78, Macmillan

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• The governments of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi-occult power which....pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I.

  J. F. C. Fuller

  War, World Government, Hands

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• This it is that gives a majesty so pure and touching to the historic figure of Christ; self-abandonment to God, uttermost surrender, without reserve or stipulation, to the guidance of the Holy Spirit from the Soul of souls; pause in no darkness; hesitation in no perplexity, recoil in no extremity of anguish, but a gentle unfaltering hold of the invisible Hand, of the Only Holy and All Good--these are the features that have made Jesus of Nazareth the dearest and most sacred image to the heart of so many ages.

  James Martineau

  Jesus, Heart, Self

  James Martineau (1905). “A Martineau year book: Extracts from sermons”

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• The net effect of increasing scale, centralization of capital, vertical integration and diversification within the corporate form of enterprise has been to replace the 'invisible hand' of the market by the 'visible hand' of the managers.

  David Harvey

  Hands, Form, Centralization

  "The Limits To Capital". Book by David Harvey, 1982.

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