Economic Principles Quotes

Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.

Capitalism is based on a kind of inherited moral climate.

Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that "Price is what you pay; value is what you get." Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.

Economists are people who wonder if what works in reality can also work in theory.

There is not one single social or economic principle or concept in the philosophy of the Russian Bolshevik which has not been realized, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the white ant.

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of the financial markets.

I believe in limited government. I believe that government should be limited in many ways, …. No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race

My friends Sir Roger de Coverly and Sir Andrew Freeport are of different principles, the first of them inclined to the landed and the other to the moneyed interest.

The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics.

The general principles of political economy teach us to buy all our commodities where we can have them the cheapest; and perhaps there is no general rule in the whole compass of the science to which fewer justifiable exceptions can be found in practice

You can keep raising it, but at some point, everybody who believes in a minimum wage will say, "No, wait a minute. That's too much," and at that point, you have demonstrated that that there's no market relationship. You're just talking emotion. You're just talking "fairness." You're just talking being nice, and that's not how the market works. People aren't paid a wage because they're being nice to, or because it's fair. In the market, the market rules.

We're conditioned to let businesses fail, regardless of how much we like them. We believe that if the market doesn't want that bookstore to exist, then it shouldn't exist.

It is a misfortune of the times that all of us must needs be amateur economists-including, and perhaps especially, the professionals.

Like everyone else, rich people respond to incentives.

Economics is not an exact science.

Economics is a form of brain damage.

The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.

I have never considered myself an economist.

I'm pro-business! But business ought to make its own money.

I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray.

Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.

If you don't donate to Obama and you're a major corporation like Big Oil, then they're gonna blame you for climate change, destroying the planet and they're gonna get everybody turned against you and hating your guts and so forth, and that's how they operate. That's not how Trump operates. That's not how Mike Pence operates. They understand the simple mathematics of economics.

Take care to be an economist in prosperity. There is no fear of your being one in adversity.

So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.