Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What is so striking about Liberia is that in a place where there is so much to be done, I have never seen so many people with nothing to do.
Countries which enjoy the highest level of peace, happiness and prosperity are the ones where the law least interfered with private affairs.
In a banana republic, one might slip on a banana peel but things do work - now and then for the people, albeit inefficiently and unreliably.
Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces.
We do not interpret bitcoin's popularity as having a relationship with the public's view of the Federal Reserve's conduct of monetary policy
When a tree, a natural product, is felled, is society put into possession of no greater produce than that of the mere labour of the woodman?
You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.
All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less - and probably was much less - than a million.
The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.
By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
Perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors.
If we want a stronger, cleaner, and fairer world economy, we need to deal with the controversial areas of globalisation, such as tax havens.
Negative interest rates hurt banks' balance sheets, with the 'wealth effect' on banks overwhelming the small increase in incentives to lend.
In the end, the politics of the euro zone weren't strong enough to create a fully integrated fiscal union with a common banking system, etc.
Regulatory reform must move beyond limiting the damage that the financial sector can do and ensure that the sector genuinely serves society.
To maximise global social welfare, policymakers should strongly encourage the diffusion of knowledge from developed to developing countries.
An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year - an economy like America's - is not likely to do well over the long haul.
Nobody, in my lifetime, in either party, has reached out with a message of hope, growth and opportunity to minorities better than Jack Kemp.
Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
This [climate change] is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?
People who are complaining about the Fed are people who've been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn't happened.
The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics.
The supply price and the demand price should be roughly the same. You're not supposed to have two different prices. According to economists.
Doctors and hospitals should be paid for keeping their patients well. Paying them for doing more tests and surgeries creates bad incentives.
Man is naturally more desirous of a quiet and approving, than of a vigilant and tender conscience--more desirous of security than of safety.
The average family exists only on paper and its average budget is a fiction, invented by statisticians for the convenience of statisticians.
What is often lacking is not creativity in the idea-creating sense but innovation in the action-producing sense, i.e. putting ideas to work.
How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
Loud dress becomes offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar.
[We are] persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.
If our country is to survive and prosper, we must summon the courage to condemn and reject the liberal agenda, and we had better do it soon.
...our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.
I don't particularly like going on about being gay or making a big thing about it, but I think it's a bit of a pain to be secretive about it.
Anarchy is no guarantee that some people won't kill, injure, kidnap, defraud, or steal from others. Government is a guarantee that some will.
When I was growing up in South Korea in the '70s and early '80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged.
Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.
The ability of the market to serve society gas been and is continually being undermined by the attacks levelled by its ideological opponents.
Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
More dangerous than voting for change... is that people no longer vote because they have lost trust not only in governments but in democracy.
Government is an inherently inflationary institution and will ever remain so until it is dispossessed of its monopoly of the supply of money.
If manufacturing jobs do come back to the U.S., they will be done by robots in hi-tech parts of the country rather than the Rust Belt states.
The voter problems and voter suppression, in some ways they're the same thing, but in some ways they're not, because the suppression is evil.
This was in 2004, and it told me that President [Barack] Obama intended to be very careful and noncontroversial in addressing race matters. I