Top 35 Stigler's Quotes
#1. Generally there is Stigler's law of Eponymy that says that a scientific notion is never attributed to the right person; in particular, the law is not due to Stigler.
Dennis Lindley
#2. Stigler's Law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
George Stigler
#3. That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.
George Stigler
#4. It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation.
George Stigler
#5. I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970.
George Stigler
#6. The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930's were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.
George Stigler
#7. The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization
George Stigler
#8. Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion.
Stephen Stigler
#10. It is distressing how often one can guess the answer given to an economic question merely by knowing who asks it.
George Stigler
#11. After the war, I returned to Minnesota, from which I soon moved to Brown University, and a year later, to Columbia University where I remained from 1947 until 1958.
George Stigler
#12. As George J. Stigler said of some of his fellow Nobel Laureates, they issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.
Thomas Sowell
#13. A Swedish physicist can not discuss his work with fifty people unless he goes abroad. A Swedish economist can get opinions and instructions in his native language from thousands upon thousands of his fellow citizens.
George Stigler
#14. I started working and publishing in price theory by 1938.
George Stigler
#15. My teaching began in 1936 at Iowa State College where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman.
George Stigler
#16. My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director.
George Stigler
#17. Friedman stumbled in, late to the seminar as usual and reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey. He hadn't read the paper being presented, and halfway through he just gets up, walks up to the podium, socks the mother****er right in the face and takes a piss all over his lecture notes.
George Stigler
#18. The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.
George Stigler
#20. I attended schools in Seattle through the University of Washington, from which I was graduated in 1931. I spent the next year at Northwestern University.
George Stigler
#21. If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport.
George Stigler
#22. Two years later, I went to the University of Minnesota from which I was on leave for several years during the war as a member of Statistical Research Group at Columbia University.
George Stigler
#23. Competition is a tough weed, not a delicate flower.
George Stigler
#24. George Stigler was a delightful correspondent. In a letter from London in 1948, after remarking on the inconvertibility of the pound and the inedible, still-rationed food, he concluded, So here I am losing weight and gaining pounds.
Milton Friedman
#25. George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature"
Robert Kuttner
#26. Adam Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interest under conditions of competition.
George Stigler
#27. All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
George Stigler
#28. In the 1950s, I proposed the survivor method of determining the efficient sizes of enterprises, and worked on delivered price systems, vertical integration, and similar topics.
George Stigler
#29. Am I to admire a man who injures me in an awkward and mistaken attempt to protect me, and to despise a man who to earn a good income performs for me some great and lasting service?
George J. Stigler
#30. The number of saintly men has not yet risen to the level where the census makes them a separate statistical category.
George Stigler
#31. And yet I would not freely exchange my science for those of my fellow laureates. They are forever confined in their professional discussions to the small numbers of their fellow scientists.
George Stigler
#32. My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938.
George Stigler
#33. Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yield a single price.
George Stigler
#34. I recall my mother asking in about 1946 what I was and I replied proudly that I was a professor. A decade later she repeated her question and I repeated my answer. "No promotion?" was her comment.
George Stigler
#35. There is only one social science and we are its practitioners
George Stigler
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