Robert C Merton Quotes

#1. My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.

Robert C. Merton

#2. He counts votes before he decides what to have for breakfast.

John Grisham

#3. Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.

Robert K. Merton

#4. When will they make a tractor that can furnish the manure for farm fields and produce a baby tractor every spring?

George Erik Rupp

#5. My principal contribution to the Black-Scholes option-pricing theory was to show that the dynamic trading strategy prescribed by Black and Scholes to offset the risk exposure of an option would provide a perfect hedge in the limit of continuous trading.

Robert C. Merton

#6. One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark's Saturday night 'American Bandstand' show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.

Robert C. Merton

#7. The first job of a leader is to define reality."1

Kara Powell

#8. The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and uncomfortable.

Robert K. Merton

#9. I think every case is different. Every situation is different. People come on the F.B.I.'s radar screen for a variety of reasons at a variety of times.

Barack Obama

#10. I just wanted to be sure of you.

A.A. Milne

#11. As it happens, although I was at MIT on the faculty full-time for 18 years and then at Harvard for another 16, so I've always been in full-time academia, I always found it was both beneficial for my research and beneficial for the other work to be involved in the practicing community.

Robert C. Merton

#12. Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.

Robert K. Merton

#13. School work and intellectual interests such as music and the arts were not especially important to me while I was growing up, although mathematics, my favorite subject, was fun. Baseball was my first passion: I played sand lot and Little League and rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Robert C. Merton

#14. I think in the case of my father, in terms of the things that influenced me, he never pressed me to go into academics or pressed me to go to a field, and indeed, my behavior was largely to move as far the other direction. I don't think that's uncommon with people with very successful parents.

Robert C. Merton

#15. As an undergraduate at Columbia, I went to the engineering school. I had a great deal of training in engineering and mathematics as well as subdiversified training. And then I went to the California Institute of Technology to do my Ph.D. in applied math.

Robert C. Merton

#16. My mother taught me caring and sensitivity towards the feelings of others, animals as well as humans. She gave me much good, practical advice for getting through life.

Robert C. Merton

#17. Science is public, not private, knowledge.

Robert K. Merton