Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938.
We can change who we are. We can improve ourselves in various ways, and we can give ourselves possibilities.
If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.
If we were not in Vietnam, all that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.
The U.K. is much stronger as a part of Europe, and Europe is much stronger with the U.K. as a driving force.
Success depends on intuition, on seeing what afterwards proves true but cannot be established at the moment.
Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.
There is no better protection against the euro crisis than successful structural reforms in southern Europe.
When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something."
In this day and age, we need to revise the old saying to read, "Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.
Adaptation is the only means to reduce the now-unavoidable costs of climate change over the next few decades
The unambigious fact is that U.S. capitalism is a mechanism for looting the many for the benefit of the few.
I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.
The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices.
It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side, and another to wish sincerely to be on the side of truth.
I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.
The commercial storm leaves its path strewn with ruin. When it is over there is calm, but a dull, heavy calm.
I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.
The poor get bored the same as the rest of us. Their happiness might be as important to them as their health.
The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.
Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.
Long-term unemployment can make any worker progressively less employable, even after the economy strengthens.
The runs started in Thailand after the IMF intervened in such a dramatic way. Then the IMF came to Indonesia.
The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves.
The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.
If I came home with a grade of A, my father would say, 'There must have been a lot of dummies in that class.'
Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself.
New technologies, however remarkable they might seem, are fundamentally just tools made by people for people.
The ingenious slogan that the public debt does not matter because 'we owe it to ourselves' is clearly absurd.
What...can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.
A country that goes out of its way to imprison the innocent has no business preaching democracy to the world.
I have come to the conclusion that the West is a vast lie machine for the secret agendas of vested interests.
The trouble with poverty, as an issue, is that it has basically exhausted the patience of the general public.
We behavioralists differ from our more traditional brethren in the way we characterize agents in the economy.
I think behavioral economists don't have any more of an explanation about the rise of Trump than anyone else.
The decision to have a child is both a private and a public decision, for children are our collective future.
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.
In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
Newton expected no money from establishing his originality but rather desired recognition for his excellence.
A correct theory is the first step towards improvement, by showing what we need and what we might accomplish.
Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.
There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then leave it half done.
The children of the unemployed achieve less in school and appear to have reduced long-term earnings prospects.