Economist Quotes

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

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

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.

Ideas shape the course of history.

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

In the long run we are all dead.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

The status quo is the only solution that cannot be vetoed.

I find that the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.

A university anywhere can aim no higher than to be as British as possible for the sake of the undergraduates, as German as possible for the sake of the public at large-and as confused as possible for the preservation of the whole uneasy balance.

The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.

Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.

Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.

Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.

How can a man be said to have a country when he has not right of a square inch of it.

Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.

Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.

There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism.

That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.

He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.

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

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.