Quotes about economy-and-economics

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

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

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

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

— Russell (Wayne) Baker

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

— Edmund Burke

Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.

— Edmund Burke

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

— Marcus T. Cicero

Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

— Charles Caleb Colton

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Everyone is always in favor of general economy and particular expenditure.

— Sir Anthony Eden

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

— Edgar R. Fiedler

For economist the real world is often a special case.

— Edgar R. Fiedler

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

— Irving Fisher

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

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

— Benjamin Franklin

In economics the majority is always wrong.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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

I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes.

— Edward Gibbon

Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.

— Thomas Gray

No one is rich whose expenditures exceed his means, and no one is poor whose incomings exceed his outgoings.

— Thomas C. Haliburton

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

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.

— Ernest Hemingway

Be thrifty, but not covetous.

— George Herbert

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

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.

— Doug Horton

I learned more about the economy from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years of college.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

Never spend your money before you have earned it.

— Thomas Jefferson

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

The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.

— Jean-Paul Kauffmann

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 F. Kennedy

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

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

If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn't be a bad thing.

— Peter Lynch

A nation is not in danger of financial disaster merely because it owes itself money.

— Andrew William Mellon

Much in little.

— Motto

If you laid every economist in the country end to end you would still not reach a conclusion.

— Salvador Nasello

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

— Ezra Pound

We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.

— Ronald Reagan

An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else s.

— Will Rogers

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

Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.

— John Ruskin

Profit is the ignition system of our economic engine.

— Charles Sawyer

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. Schumacher

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

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.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

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

Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other.

— Harry S Truman

An economist is someone who knows more about money than the people who have it.

— Source Unknown

If you took all the economists in the world and laid them end-to-end, they couldn't reach a conclusion

— Source Unknown

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. Wells

The term bail-out is deceptive. They have people come up with euphenisms to hide reality

— James Dye

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

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.

— Ronald Reagan