Top 100 Economist Quotes
#2. My colleague Bill Keegan has written a very short book ('Saving the World?') on an unlikely topic - he is the first economist to try to rehabilitate Gordon Brown.
Simon Hoggart
#4. An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory.
Ronald Reagan
#5. Every company that has an economist working for him has one employee too many.
Warren Buffett
#6. My mother died of lung cancer last year. I felt helpless. As an economist, I thought, 'What can I do?'
Andrew Lo
#7. Coal, in truth, stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country - the universal aid - the factor in everything we do." - William Stanley Jevons, economist, 1865
Naomi Klein
#8. The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information - the data - and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day.
Emily Oster
#9. I am looking forward to learning at the knee of Paul Ryan. He doesn't strike me as a politician. He strikes me as an economist.
Todd Rokita
#10. In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.
Peter Drucker
#11. Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does.
Ilana Mercer
#12. One effect of benefit-cost analysis is to give any respectable engineer or economist a means for justifying almost any kind of project the national government wants to justify ... Exclusive reliance on benefit-cost analysis has been one of the greatest threats to wise decisions in water development.
Gilbert F. White
#13. I think that whether you're on the right or on the left as an economist or as a policy maker, every serious analyst I know agrees that at some point you have to deal with entitlements.
Peter Blair Henry
#14. With various people complaining about "price gouging? ... economist Walter Williams has coined a new term: "Tax gouging." But government is never accused of either "greed" or "gouging" ? not even when they bulldoze people's homes in order to turn.
Thomas Sowell
#15. U.S. Internal Revenue Service: an agency modeled after the revenue raising concepts of the 19th century economist, Jesse James.
Robert Breault
#16. I don't know of a single economist who disagrees that when you raise the minimum wage, you kill jobs for the poor.
Newt Gingrich
#17. I don't think that any economist disputes that we're in the worst economic crisis since the great depression. The good news is that we're getting a consensus around what needs to be done.
Barack Obama
#18. Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn, one a political scientist and the other an economist, argue that "approval voting" allows voters to express their true preferences without concern for electability.8 Under approval voting, each voter may vote for as many candidates as he wishes.
Avinash K. Dixit
#19. 'The Economist' is a biased organization.
Ali Babacan
#20. I spend my time being a retailer, not an economist.
Mike Duke
#21. On the one hand X is true, but on the other hand, Y is true," Harry S. Truman is reported to have muttered in frustration, "Get me a one-armed economist!
Hal Herzog
#22. I had a choice. I could become an economist & managing director. I choose to do something else. I would have become much, much richer than I am. I choose to not do that. It's that simple.
Odd Nerdrum
#23. Economics is too important to leave to the economists.
Steve Keen
#24. The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#25. Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#26. When I meet people on airplanes and they find out I'm an economist, they usually ask about stock tips.
Emily Oster
#27. As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.
Thomas Sowell
#28. Launching an innovative premium jelly bouillon into a highly competitive market at the height of austerity, for example, might not have been thought the wisest move. Yet with people eating out less, the demand for high-quality convenience products that enable people to cook at home has grown. As
Jaideep Prabhu, Paul Polman, The Economist Navi Radjou
#29. My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot.
Jennifer Gilmore
#30. I'm an economist by training. And I know that what works is a permanent increase in buying power.
Sarah Steelman
#31. Government spending? I don't know what it's all about. I don't know any more about this thing than an economist does, and, God knows, he doesn't know much.
Will Rogers
#32. Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other.
Harry S. Truman
#33. Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist.
George Bernard Shaw
#36. I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography.
Sebastiao Salgado
#37. I'm an economist, not a political scientist.
Dambisa Moyo
#38. If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent an educator. If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist. If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist. But since our greatest need was forgiveness, God sent us a Saviour.
Roy Lessin
#39. Harry Truman once said: "Find me a one-armed economist, because every one I know always says, 'Well, on the other hand . . .
Ronald Reagan
#40. What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong.
Robert Kuttner
#41. I think you've got to watch out for anybody in high school who says he wants to become an economist.
Thomas J. Sargent
#42. Economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it.
William Easterly
#43. There is something, however humble, which can properly be called skill among those who recognise themselves as economists.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#44. For a country, everything will be lost when the jobs of an economist and a banker become highly respected professions.
Baron De Montesquieu
#45. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back
John Maynard Keynes
#46. Here, economists will recognize the principle of price differentiation formulated by the engineer-economist Jules Dupuit in 1849: "To set a price for a service, don't base it on what it costs the provider, but instead set the price according to the importance of the service to the user."[10]
Bernard Girard
#47. The point of studying economics is so as not to be fooled by economists.
Joan Robinson
#48. In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#49. If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.
Clayton Christensen
#50. All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
George Stigler
#51. As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Martin Amis
#52. There is nothing an economist should fear so much as applause.
Herbert Marshall
#53. Part of my job at 'The Economist' was writing about HIV, and that included the grim task of reporting on the state of the global epidemic.
Shereen El Feki
#54. If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.
Danny Hillis
#55. I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.
Muhammad Yunus
#56. I'm an economist by training. I don't really work as an economist. I only worked briefly as an economist.
Ben Stein
#57. For economist the real world is often a special case.
Edgar Fiedler
#58. I'm an economist. I'm not a political servant.
Marc Faber
#59. A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#60. An economist is a scoundrel who tells you the way things are rather than the way you want them to be.
William Nordhaus
#61. I set out to become the greatest lover in Vienna, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest economist in the world. Alas, for the illusions of youth: as a horseman, I was never really first-rate.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#62. An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
Alfred A. Knopf
#64. I'm not an economist; I'm a hacker who has spent his career exploring and repairing large networks.
Dan Kaminsky
#65. I think the association of economics with forecasting is unfortunate and is down to the fact that one great way to get an investment bank's name on business television is to hire a guy called a Chief Economist who will go and prognosticate.
Tim Harford
#66. Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.
Joseph Stiglitz
#67. When an economist says the evidence is "mixed," he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite.
Richard Thaler
#68. I don't imagine Heads of Government would ever be able to say I'm not an economist therefore I can't take decisions on matters of the economy; I'm not a soldier I can't take decisions on matters of defence; I'm not an educationist so I can't take decisions about education.
Thabo Mbeki
#69. An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.
Will Rogers
#70. I am not an economist ... I am not a business technician. I am a revolutionary, and I do what is right for an economic revolutionary.
Sukarno
#71. Nature's economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics.
Carl Linnaeus
#72. The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.
Naomi Wolf
#73. But there is no equality of opportunity under existing laws and customs. In the race for wealth, which the economist seems as unable to define as to guide, the toiler is most heavily handicapped in the very start.
Joshua K. Ingalls
#74. The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#76. I want a one-armed economist, that way he cannot say, 'on the other hand'.
Harry S. Truman
#78. Please find me a one-armed economist so we will not always hear, "On the other hand ... "
Herbert Hoover
#79. Democracy will defeat the economist at every turn on its own genre.
Harold Innis
#80. To start with, anybody who would like the world to be a better place should be able to think like an economist.
Diane Coyle
#81. Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.
Robert W. Cox
#82. There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#83. 'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best economist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#85. Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much.
Paul Krugman
#86. They called me the sexiest economist in America, and that was years ago, when I had hair and body mass and my teeth were shiny.
Mark Zandi
#87. In most cases I start off with a sketch. But I'm also thinking about real images: out of National Geographic, out of fashion magazines, out of The Economist, out of Time. I'm making a sketch, but I'm using the existing images that have been put out in the world.
Wangechi Mutu
#88. You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words "supply" and "demand."
Thomas Carlyle
#89. Report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of
Bill Bryson
#90. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist.
David Attenborough
#91. I was an economist now turning into a human being - as if these are two different things. I don't know but I did that and then I had no vision.
Muhammad Yunus
#92. I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.
Rupert Murdoch
#93. Combining valuable insights from his experience in China, his time as the World Bank's chief economist, and the 2008 financial crisis, Justin Yifu Lin's recommendations for development policy reflect an impressive and unique personal journey.
Kemal Dervis
#94. As a preacher, I should be prompted to tell men, not so much how to get their wheat bread cheaper, as of the bread of life compared with which that is bran. Let a man only taste these loaves, and he becomes a skillful economist at once.
Henry David Thoreau
#95. Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.
Lionel Trilling
#96. To the despair of every economist, it seems almost impossible for most people other than trained economists to comprehend how a price system works. Reporters and TV commentators seem especially resistant to the elementary principles they supposedly imbibed in freshman economics. Second,
Milton Friedman
#97. What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.
Douglass North
#98. There is nothing as dangerous as an economist who only knows economics except the moral philosopher who knows no economics.
Peter J. Boettke
#99. Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist.
E.F. Schumacher
#100. As the eastbound flight reached cruising altitude, Cindy opened the latest issue of the Economist - she saved her smarter reading for public situations - when
J. Ryan Stradal
