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.
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.
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.
It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.
Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
There can be economy only where there is efficiency.
Everyone is always in favor of general economy and particular expenditure.
Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
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.
Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations six if one went to Harvard.
For economist the real world is often a special case.
The rate of interest acts as a link between income-value and capital-value
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?
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
In economics the majority is always wrong.
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
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.
I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes.
Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.
No one is rich whose expenditures exceed his means, and no one is poor whose incomings exceed his outgoings.
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.
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
Be thrifty, but not covetous.
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.
How great, my friends, is the virtue of living upon a little!
— Horace
First rule of Economics 101: our desires are insatiable. Second rule: we can stomach only three Big Macs at a time.
I learned more about the economy from one South Dakota dust storm that I did in all my years of college.
Never spend your money before you have earned it.
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.
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.
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.
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn't be a bad thing.
A nation is not in danger of financial disaster merely because it owes itself money.
Much in little.
— Motto
If you laid ever economist in the country end to end you would still not reach a conclusion.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.
The 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.
An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else s.
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.
Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.
Profit is the ignition system of our economic engine.
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.
Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.
Economy is too late when you are at the bottom of your purse.
— Seneca
If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
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.
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.
Give me a one-handed economist! All my economics say, On the one hand on the other.
An economist is someone who knows more about money than the people who have it.
If you took all the economists in the world and laid them end-to-end, they couldn't reach a conclusion
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.