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To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics.

— Thomas Piketty

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More quotes by Thomas Piketty

Capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market.

Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts – and that is a very good thing.

Broadly speaking, the rise of the supermanager is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon.

We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

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Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing.

Bertrand Russell

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Piketty (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.