Economics Quotes

“I have never been in the business of making predictions; I am not now, and I never will be in that business.”

Tony Blair, 1997

Concerning his chances in the upcoming election

"There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies & statistics."

Benjamin Disraeli

"In economics there are some, even if not many, immutable laws – laws of an order of certainty of Calvin Coolidge's possibly apocryphal dictum that when many people are out of work, unemployment results."

J.K. Galbraith

"The ideas of economics & political philosophers, both when they are right & when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

John Maynard Keynes

“I have had a growing feeling that mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypothesis is very unlikely to be good economics, and I go more and more on the rules:

1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language rather than as an engine of inquiry.

2) Keep to them until you have done.

3) Translate into English.

4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.

5) Burn the mathematics.

6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3.

…This last I do often.”

Alfred Marshall

“My only confident dogma in economics is that every short statement on a broad issue is inherently false.”

Alfred Marshall

"The truth may be puzzling. It may be counterintuitive. It might contradict deeply-held prejudices. It may not be consistent with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true."

Carl Sagan

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.”

Adam Smith

"Economics are the method. The object is to change the heart and soul."

Margaret Thatcher