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If your outgo exceeds your income your upkeep will be your downfall.
-Anon., attributed to Bill Earle, usually referred to as an old saying
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Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
-Hannah Arendt
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For the past 15 years or so, British governments have tried to persuade the rest of us that the best judges of the national interest are...businessmen. This may be a ridiculous statement, but -- ominously -- fewer and fewer people laugh at it.
-Neil Ascherson
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The notion that big business and big labor and big government can sit down around a table somewhere and work out the direction of the American economy is at complete variance with the reality of where the American economy is headed. I mean, it's like dinosaurs gathering to talk about the evolution of a new generation of mammals.
-Bruce Babbit
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It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
-Russell Baker
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Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
-Edmund Burke
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Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
-Edmund Burke
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We are enjoying sluggish times and not enjoying them very much.
-George Bush
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Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.
-Joseph Campbell
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The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history.
-Fidel Castro
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People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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My other piece of advice, Copperfield, said Mr. Micawber, you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and - and in short you are for ever floored. As I am!
-Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
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There can be economy only where there is efficiency.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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The term bail-out is deceptive. They have people come up with euphenisms to hide reality
-James Dye
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Members of Congress were told they could face martial law if they didn't pass the bailout bill. This will not be the last time.
-James Dye
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I could've told you this was gonna happen 8 years ago because it is on purpose.
-James Dye
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Everyone is always in favor of general economy and particular expenditure.
-Sir Anthony Eden
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Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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According to the Bank of England the economy is growing too fast so interest rates must rise to counter the supposed inflationary threat. In lay terms, I interpret this to mean that people are working much harder, causing economic growth, and they're in danger of spending their money, which is what the recession-hit shops want them to do. But the Bank and the City seem to think this is wrong, and that if people work harder they should be punished by having their mortgages increased.
-Harry Enfield
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Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations six if one went to Harvard.
-Edgar R. Fiedler
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For economist the real world is often a special case.
-Edgar R. Fiedler
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The rate of interest acts as a link between income-value and capital-value
-Irving Fisher
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Few are sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why, except for some special reason, read an inferior book, at the very time you might be reading one of the highest order?
-John W. Foster
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No nation was ever ruined by trade.
-Benjamin Franklin
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In economics the majority is always wrong.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes.
-Edward Gibbon
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Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.
-Thomas Gray
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No one is rich whose expenditures exceed his means, and no one is poor whose incomings exceed his outgoings.
-Thomas C. Haliburton
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With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.
-Friedrich A. Hayek
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The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.
http://www.jim.com/econ/chap01p1.html
-Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
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Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in , say, physics, mathematics, or medicine -- the special pleading of selfish interests.
-Henry Hazlitt
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Be thrifty, but not covetous.
-George Herbert
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There is much of economic theory which is pursued for no better reason than its intellectual attraction; it is a good game. We have no reason to be ashamed of that, since the same would hold for many branches of mathematics.
-John Hicks
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How great, my friends, is the virtue of living upon a little!
-Horace
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First rule of Economics 101: our desires are insatiable. Second rule: we can stomach only three Big Macs at a time.
-Doug Horton
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I learned more about the economy from one South Dakota dust storm that I did in all my years of college.
-Hubert Humphrey
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Never spend your money before you have earned it.
-Thomas Jefferson
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Commerce is one of the daughters of Fortune, inconsistent and deceitful as her mother. she chooses her residence where she is least expected, and shifts her home when in appearance she seems firmly settled.
-Ben Johnston
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In a society of little economic development, universal inactivity accompanies universal poverty. You survive not by struggling against nature, or by increasing production, or by relentless labor; instead you survive by expending as little energy as possible, by striving constantly to achieve a state of immobility.
-Ryszard Kapuscinski
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The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
-Jean-Paul Kauffmann
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Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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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.
-John Maynard Keynes
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If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
-John Maynard Keynes
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So-called austerity, the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path. Pull in your belt is a slogan closely related to gird up your loins, or the guns-butter metaphor.
-Percy Wynham Lewis
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If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn't be a bad thing.
-Peter Lynch
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When someone says that the free market isn't working, what he means is that he doesn't like the way the free market is working.
-Nicolas Martin, "Indianapolis Star"
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A nation is not in danger of financial disaster merely because it owes itself money.
-Andrew William Mellon
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The freedom to make a fortune on the stock exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.
-Sir John Mortimer
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If you laid ever economist in the country end to end you would still not reach a conclusion.
-Salvador Nasello
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In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
-Ezra Pound
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We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.
-Ronald Reagan
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Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.
-Ronald Reagan
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Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-Ronald Reagan
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The whole financial structure of Wall Street seems to rise or fall on the mere fact that the Federal Reserve Bank raises or lowers the amount of interest. Any business that can't survive a one percent change must be skating on thin ice.
Why even the poor farmer took a raise of another ten percent just to get a loan from the bank, and nobody from the government paid any attention. But you let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help to get them back into bed again.
-Will Rogers, August 12, 1929
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An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else s.
-Will Rogers
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But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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-Murray N. Rothbard
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Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.
-John Ruskin
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The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices... inflation is itself a problem. But the legitimate and hysterical fears of inflation are - quite aside from the evil of inflation itself - likely, in their own right, to be problems. In short, I fear inflation. And I fear the fear of inflation. Avoiding inflation is not an absolute imperative, but rather is one of a number of conflicting goals that we must pursue and that we may often have to compromise. Even if the military outlook were serene - and it is not - modern democracies must expect in the future to be much of the time at, or near, the point where inflation is a concern. Our greatest economic problem will be to face that concern realistically, to weigh inflation's quantitative evil against the evils of actions taken against it, to develop methods of adjusting to the residue of inflation which attainment of the 'golden mean' might involve. The challenge is great but the prognosis is cheerful.
Responding to the question: What is the most important economic problem to be faced by the United States in the next twenty years?
-Paul A. Samuelson, 1958
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...a force that operates year-in and year-out, whenever we are at high employment, to push up prices. It's a price creep, not a price gallop; but the bad thing about it is that, instead of setting in only after you have reached overfull employment, the suspicion is dawning that it may be a problem that plagues us even when we haven't arrived at a satisfactory level of employment.
describing cost-push inflation
-Paul A. Samuelson, (interview), "U.S. News World Report", 1960
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Various experts, here and abroad, believe that the immediate postwar inflationary climate has now been converted into an epoch of price stability. One hopes this cheerful diagnosis is correct. However, a careful survey of the behavior of prices and costs shows that our recent stability in the wholesale price index has come in a period of admittedly high unemployment and slackness in our economy. For this reason it is premature to believe that the restoration of high employment will no longer involve problems concerning the stability of prices.
Economists are not yet agreed how serious this new malady of inflation really is. Many feel that new institutional programs, other than conventional fiscal and monetary policies, must be devised to meet this new challenge. But whatever the merits of the varying views on this subject, it should be made manifest that the goal of high employment and effective real growth cannot be abandoned because of the problematical fear that re-attaining prosperity in America may bring with it some difficulties; if recovery means a reopening of the cost-push problem, then we have no choice but to move closer to the day when that problem has to be successfully grappled with.
-Paul A. Samuelson, from a report to President-elect Kennedy on the state of the American economy, 1961
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I think, without question, that unemployment of more than 6 per cent is something to be concerned about. You don't push the panic button, but you don't relax and enjoy it either... I myself don't believe in a numbers game in which you give a maximum tolerable percentage, because I think, truly, it does vary with the times... I would hesitate to specify the figure today, but I will say this: it would be, in my mind, less than a 4 per cent figure - that is, for the period ahead. I would not, realistically, think we could hope for a 2 per cent figure in the near future, as certain European countries have been able to do. But I do think that if we are pretty zealous in this matter and insist upon getting low figures - say, 3.5 per cent - then our very success in accomplishing that may lead to a new epoch just beyond when we could hope to go below 3 per cent...
-Paul A. Samuelson, (interview), "U.S. News World Report", December, 1960
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Profit is the ignition system of our economic engine.
-Charles Sawyer
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Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be uneconomic you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
-E. F. [Ernst Friedrich] Schumacher
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Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.
-Joseph Schumpeter
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Economy is too late when you are at the bottom of your purse.
-Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
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If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
-Thomas Sowell
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The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
-James Thurber
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Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other.
-Harry S Truman
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October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
-Mark Twain
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An economist is someone who knows more about money than the people who have it.
-Source Unknown
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If you took all the economists in the world and laid them end-to-end, they couldn't reach a conclusion
-Source Unknown
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The recent gain in the stock market is like climbing half-way up a ditch, which is great, but you're still in the ditch
-Quinn Van Zanten
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The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.
-H. G. [Herbert George] Wells
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The truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.
-Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom 1913, Chapter 1
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The only reason to invest in the market is because you think you know something others don't.
-R. Foster Winans
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Books about Economics
