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Thomas Schelling Quotes

1921–2016 United States

Thomas Crombie Schelling (born 14 April 1921 - 2016) was an American economist and professor of foreign policy, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control at the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, College Park. He is also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute.

United States
Academics
Economists
Educators
Nobel laureates

Random Thomas Schelling quote

4 quotes

By "market" is meant the entire complex of institutions within which people buy and sell and hire and are hired and borrow and lend and trade and contract and shop around to find bargains.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978)

The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.

Nobel Prize lecture (2005)

The essence of these tactics is some voluntary but irreversible sacrifice of freedom of choice. They rest on the paradox that the power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself; that, in bargaining, weakness is often strength, freedom may be freedom to capitulate, and to burn bridges behind one may suffice to undo an opponent.

Arms control is so often identified with limitations on the possession or deployment of weapons that it is often overlooked that this reciprocated investment in non-nuclear capability was a remarkable instance of unacknowledged but reciprocated arms control.

Nobel Prize lecture (2005)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Schelling (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.