188 quotes
Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell.
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)
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.
The Affluent Society (1958)
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
A History of Economics (1991)
The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds.
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)
One must always have in mind one simple fact — there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.
Interview with John Newark (1990)
The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)
Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.
The New Industrial State (1967)
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.
The New Industrial State (1967)
In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.
The New Industrial State (1967)
No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousandshares ofGeneral Motors or General Electric.
The New Industrial State (1967)
Clerks in downtown hotels were said to be asking guests whether they wished the room for sleeping or jumping. Two men jumped hand-in-hand from a high window in the Ritz. They had a joint account.
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)
One of the small but rewarding vocations of a free society is the provision of needed conclusions, properly supported by statistics and moral indignation, for those in a position to pay for them.
The New Industrial State (1967)
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
The Affluent Society (1958)
You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.
Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
The New Industrial State (1967)
I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
In these matters, as often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)
Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
The Affluent Society (1958)