Economic History Quotes

#1. The dramatic modernization of the Asian economies ranks alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most important developments in economic history.

Lawrence Summers

#2. Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important.

Manmohan Singh

#3. The characteristic mark of economic history under capitalism is unceasing economic progress, a steady increase in the quantity of capital goods available, and a continuous trend toward an improvement in the general standard of living.

Ludwig Von Mises

#4. Much of the profession is empirically bankrupt because it is no longer taught economic history.

Charles P. Kindleberger

#5. The best chapters in our economic history are those that embrace the many, not the few.

David Cameron

#6. You might say that economic history is the history of people learning to manage risk.

James Surowiecki

#7. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

Noam Chomsky

#8. Economic history is a never-ending series of episodes based on falsehoods and lies, not truths. It represents the path to big money. The object is to recognize the trend whose premise is false, ride that trend and step off before it is discredited.

George Soros

#9. Every day it seems more likely that we are destined - or should one say doomed? - to replay the disastrous economic history of the 1930s.

Barry Eichengreen

#10. If we look at the past two centuries of economic history in Europe and the United States, we see an astounding pattern. Capital will accumulate in a tiny portion of the population, no matter what we do.

Annalee Newitz

#11. Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

Peter Drucker

#12. We have reached a profound point in economic history where the truth is unpalatable to the political class - and that truth is that the scale and magnitude of the problem is larger than their ability to respond - and it terrifies them.

Hugh Hendry

#13. Economic history is the most fundamental branch of history; not the most important. Foundations exist to carry better things.

John Clapham

#14. Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them.They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.

Christina Stead

#15. All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.

A.J.P. Taylor

#16. In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

Nick Clooney

#17. After all, when the world looks to America, they look to us because we are the most successful political and economic experiment in human history.

Condoleezza Rice

#18. A clear lesson of history is that a 'sine qua non' for sustained economic recovery following a financial crisis is a thoroughgoing repair of the financial system.

Janet Yellen

#19. History is, after all, something that happened to people. No 'force' whether economic or political can act except as it acts through the minds and bodies of human beings.

Priscilla Smith Robertson

#20. Istory is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade ...

Jack Kerouac

#21. It's not just about the current economic environment. History shows that slashing budgets always leads to recession.

Ha-Joon Chang

#22. It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.

Ludwig Von Mises

#23. As an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history.

Christina Romer

#24. Ladies and gentlemen, the economic disaster, the tailspin, the destruction of the greatest economic engine in the history of the world, these policies of Barack Obama's, which have led us to this point, are precisely why I fearlessly said and still say, I hope he fails.

Rush Limbaugh

#25. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined.

Thomas Piketty

#26. I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.

Camille Paglia

#27. The economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that all events are determined solely by economic forces. It simply means that economic facts are the ever recurring decisive forces, the chief points in the process of history.

Eduard Bernstein

#28. Inside the myth of Australia's economic superheroes."

We're living through the second longest boom in Australian history. You can't move for talk of the budget surplus.

Andrew Charlton

#29. The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is
ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas
engender social institutions, political changes, technologi-
cal methods of production, and all that is called economic
conditions.

Ludwig Von Mises

#30. Throughout history, when societies face tough economic times, we have seen democratic reforms deferred, decreased trust in government, persecution of minority groups, and a general shrinking of the democratic space.

Samantha Power

#31. The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.

William E. Simon

#32. There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.

Joan Robinson

#33. A History of Economic Doctrines" - written by Gide and Rist

M.L. Jhingan

#34. In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#35. The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history.

Fidel Castro

#36. The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.

Niall Ferguson

#37. Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.

Henry Louis Gates

#38. If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.

David Landes

#39. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history ... On every level - moral, strategic, military and economic - Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

Tomas Young

#40. This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.

Christiana Figueres

#41. The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun.

Steven Pinker

#42. Guns neither initiated nor enabled larger changes. Economic, political, and social development preceded and laid the foundation for the invention and use of the gun, not the other way around.

Peter A. Lorge

#43. Without an understanding of history, we are politically, culturally and socially impoverished. If we sacrifice history to economic pressures or to budget cuts, we will lose a part of who we are.

Antony Beevor

#44. Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human history, transforming one society after another, and today it has become established as an international system determining the economic fate of most of mankind.

Peter L. Berger

#45. During the 1990s, San Francisco lived through one of the most intense economic booms of its history.

Gavin Newsom

#46. We are living through one of the most fundamental shifts in history- a change in the actual belief structure of Western society. No economic, political, or military power can compare with the power of a change of mind. By deliberately changing their images of reality, people are changing the world.

Willis Harman

#47. More and more clearly every day, out of biology, anthropology, sociology, history, economic analysis, psychological insight, plain human decency and common sense, the necessary mandate of survival that we shall love all our neighbors as we do ourselves, is being confirmed and reaffirmed.

Ordway Tead

#48. This high proportion of history's decisive campaigns, the significance of which is enhanced by the comparative rarity of the direct approach, enforces the conclusion that the indirect is by far the most hopeful and economic form of strategy.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#49. I think that if we don't get these politicians to come together we face the most predictable economic crisis in history.

Erskine Bowles

#50. History shows that tax increases during a recession are a recipe for greater unemployment and economic loss.

Pete Sessions

#51. If you look at history, there seems to be a regular pattern: the country with the most powerful military also happens to be the one with the world trade currency. That gives them an enormous economic advantage, which causes goods to flow into their country.

David Graeber

#52. The social and economic impact of innovative American researchers, companies, and workers over the course of U.S. history have been enormous.

Robert Hormats

#53. There is no time in American history in which there was more economic conflict between segments of the population than there was prior to the Civil War.

G. Edward Griffin

#54. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.

John Perkins

#55. At the economic summit in China, Vladimir Putin is being accused of flirting with the first lady of China. Then again, Putin does have a history of not respecting boundaries.

Conan O'Brien

#56. History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

Robert Kiyosaki

#57. Within the stable economy it's necessary to eliminate all forms of sexual discrimination, and to provide women for the first time in our history with economic opportunities equal to those of men.

Jimmy Carter

#58. Clinton passed his first budget without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Before it led to the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, it led to a Democratic defeat in the 1994 midterms.

Tina Brown

#59. This is the true lesson of our history: war, preparation for war, and foreign military interventions have served for the most part not to protect us, as we are constantly told, but rather to sap our economic vitality and undermine our civil and economic liberties.

Robert Higgs

#60. If we really want to achieve a healthy world economy, what is needed at this juncture of history is a more efficient way of interacting which, with due regard for the sovereignty of each nation, ensures the economic well-being of all countries, not just of a few. 207.

Pope Francis

#61. I think the rise of China is one of the great events of all economic and human history, and I think this will be overwhelmingly a positive thing for the region and the world.

Paul Keating

#62. History's political and economic power structures have always abhorred 'idle people' as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#63. The greatness of America has grown out of a political and social system and a method of control of economic forces distinctly its own - our American system.

Herbert Hoover

#64. The United Nations has a critical role to play in promoting stability, security, democracy, human rights, and economic development. The UN is as relevant today as at any time in its history, but it needs reform.

Chuck Hagel

#65. For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions - art, philosophy, love, virtue - truth itself!

Joseph Conrad

#66. Throughout human history, the American Idea has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed.

Paul Ryan

#67. He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.

Boris Johnson

#68. If Mitt Romney defeats President Obama in his bid for reelection on Tuesday, it will mark the success of one of the most deeply cynical political campaigns in American history. It is hard to beat an incumbent no matter the economic climate.

Juan Williams

#69. We are at a pivotal moment in our shared history. The global goals of a healthy planet, social equality, and economic opportunity for all are within reach. But we cannot prevaricate.

Achim Steiner

#70. Sometimes it's about the economic situation and sometimes it's about the fear of others. Sometimes it's about protecting the generally accepted values. If you look at history, history is just a succession of people meeting other people, either through commerce, voyages or wars.

Philippe Falardeau

#71. Well, the questioner came from Singapore which has perhaps the best economic record in the history of developing an economy and therefore he referred to 15% per annum as modest. It's not modest-it's arrogant. Only someone from Singapore would call it modest.

Charlie Munger

#72. The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#73. As long as the incomes of the various classes of contemporary society remain beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, there can be no hope of producing a useful economic and social history.

Thomas Piketty

#74. Unlike Hegel's progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically.

John Carroll

#75. Planned parenthood in the social history of the Western countries is, indeed, a phenomenon instrin-sically related to those very changes in peoples attitudes which, on the political plane, have been causing the trend towards economic planning.

Gunnar Myrdal

#76. History is fickle. We know that. The good and bad come around and go around, and go around again. There are recessions and depressions and economic boom and bust.

Rachel Nichols

#77. By failing seriously to confront the most predicable economic crisis in our nation's history, the President's policies are committing us and our children to a diminished future.

Paul Ryan

#78. Throughout all of human history slaves have been expensive capital purchase items. And today they're disposal inputs like styrofoam cups to an economic process.

Kevin Bales

#79. This bill, by vesting the power to withhold or terminate Federal funds, creates a concentration of power of economic coercion unequaled in the history of governments-a power concentration which defies the experience of mankind with the temptation of power to corrupt.

Strom Thurmond

#80. Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.

Hannah Arendt

#81. The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists .

John Maynard Keynes

#82. By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.

Jesmyn Ward

#83. What gets in our way is history and culture and religion and economic conditions. It is part of the hypnosis of our social conditioning.

Deepak Chopra

#84. Materially we must strive to secure a broader economic opportunity for all men, so that each shall have a better chance to show the stuff of which he is made.

Theodore Roosevelt

#85. At many points during our nation's history, there have been times - known in our history textbooks as 'panics' - when adverse conditions affecting the financial and economic sectors of the country have caused individuals to hoard more than they need.

Jo Bonner

#86. Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.

Samuel E. Morison

#87. As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.

Wendell Berry

#88. The dustbin of history is littered with remains of those countries that relied on diplomacy to secure their freedom. We must never forget ... in the final analysis ... that it is our military, industrial and economic strength that offers the best guarantee of peace for America in times of danger.

Ronald Reagan

#89. The history of economic progress consists of charging a fee for what once was free.

B. Joseph Pine II

#90. Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#91. In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.

Peter Drucker

#92. China's history is marked by thousands of years of world-changing innovations: from the compass and gunpowder to acupuncture and the printing press. No one should be surprised that China has re-emerged as an economic superpower.

Gary Locke

#93. In grades 1 through 4 these books introduce the child to U.S. society - to family life, community activities, ordinary economic transactions, and some history. None of the books covering grades 1 through 4 contain one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life.

Paul Vitz

#94. We should look closely on what is happening at the moment, guys with little moustaches can pop up everywhere now given this instable economic situation. A look into history shows us what that could mean.

Steve Keen

#95. History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

#96. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.

Will Durant

#97. Capitalism is too important and complex a subject to be left to economists. Achieving a critical comprehension of it requires perspectives beyond those characteristic of modern economics. That is why this is a history not of economic ideas, but of ideas beyond the capitalist economy.

Jerry Z. Muller

#98. Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the promise of boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter.

Karl Polanyi

#99. Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments.

Lucas Mascotto-Carbone

#100. As Ohio's working families continue to recover from the worst economic recession in our country's history, we need a president who's committed to growing our economy by lifting up the middle class.

Sherrod Brown