Definitions
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer,
or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard
for their own interest.
-Adam Smith
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income
tax.
- Albert Einstein
Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute
sanity.
- George Bernard Shaw
When men are employed they are best contented.
- Benjamin Franklin
Our necessities are few but our wants are endless.
- Fortune Cookie
Investment is a flighty bird which needs to be controlled.
- J.R. Hicks
Nothing so weakens a government as inflation.
- J.K. Galbraith
Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show
the abysmal ignorance of the participants?
- Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate
We might as well reasonably dispute whether it is the upper
or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece
of paper, as whether value is governed by demand or supply.
- Alfred Marshall
Love of money is the root of all evil.
- The New Testament
Lack of money is the root of of all evil.
- George Bernard Shaw
The truth is never pure and rarely simple.
- Oscar Wilde
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
- Aldous Huxley
Money is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously what
would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without
it.
- J.S. Mill
All decent people live beyond their incomes, and those who
aren't respectable live beyond other people's incomes. A few
gifted individuals manage to do both.
- Saki
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national
debt.
- Herbert Hoover
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem
brings us face to face with another problem.
- Martin Luther King
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
- Syrus (1st century B.C.)
There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted,
but now it happens to everybody.
- Adlai Stevenson
The best way to ruin a country is to debauch its currency.
- Vladimir Lenin
The free enterprise system is absolutely too important to
be left to the competitive forces of the marketplace.
- U.S. Senator
When buying and selling is controlled by legislation, the
first ones to be bought are the legislators.
- Anonymous
Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the
means of their subsistence.
- Adam Smith
Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government
can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
- Lord Thomas Macauley
From each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs.
- Karl Marx
Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your
chains!
- Karl Marx
There is always enough for the needy, there is never enough
for the greedy.
- Mahatma Gandhi
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
- Benjamin Franklin
Everything's a trade-off. If you want a high standard of living,
you have to settle for a low quality of life.
- Anonymous
Inflation is like toothpaste. Once it's out, you can hardly
get it back in again.
- Karl Pohl, former West German
central banker
A recession is when your neighbor is out of work. A depression
is when you are out of work.
- Harry Truman
The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life.
- J.R. Hicks
Protectionism is the institutionalization of economic failure.
- Edward Heath
Next to bombing, rent control is the most effective technique
so far known for destroying cities.
- Assar Lindbeck
Supply creates its own demand.
- J.B. Say
There have been three great inventions since the beginning
of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking.
- Will Rogers
The value of a yellow metal (gold), originally chosen as money
because it tickled the fancy of savages, is clearly a chancy
and irrelevant thing on which to base the value of our money
and the stability of our industrial system.
- D.H. Robertson
Gold is a sideshow.
- Paul Samuelson
Neither a state nor a bank ever have had unrestricted power
of issuing paper money without abusing that power.
- David Ricardo
Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but
constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of
labor.
- Adam Smith
People in the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment
and diversion, but the conversation ends in some contrivance
to raise prices.
- Adam Smith
Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the
proletariat.
- George Bernard Shaw
Buy land. They ain't making any more of the stuff.
- Will Rogers
The economy of the future might be called the "spaceman
economy," in which the earth has become a single spaceship,
without unlimited reservoirs of anything.
- Kenneth Boulding
Government is an art, not a science, and an adventure, not
a planned itinerary.
- Donald Creighton
Democracy will defeat the economist at every turn on its own
genre.
- Harold Innis
It is very odd that, enjoying one of the highest living standards
in the world, Canadians in all walks of life should nevertheless
believe that their economy is a frail, hothouse creation.
- John Dales
Teach a parrot to say demand and supply, and you have created
an economist.
- Anonymous
We have one asset, and that's people.
- Sylvia Ostry
I have observed that we all get the same amount of ice. The
rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter.
- Bat Masterson
As capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse.
- Karl Marx
Inflation is the time when those who have saved for a rainy
day get soaked.
- Anonymous
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation, the
second is war. Both bring temporary prosperity; both bring
permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic
opportunists.
- Ernest Hemingway
In the long run we are all dead.
- John Maynard Keynes