Economist Quotes

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.

The rate of interest acts as a link between income-value and capital-value.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

For economist the real world is often a special case.

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

Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.