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Finance Quotes

Thomas Paine has the most entries, followed by Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, David Graeber and Paul Samuelson. The sourced lines are scattered. Joseph Conrad, in Victory (1915), calls finance a mysterious world in which, incredible as it may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) is here for a passage on how the state should treat the criminal poor. Asimov’s 1950 novel is the source of the line that economics is on the side of humanity now.

The one flagged entry is “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable,” credited to John Kenneth Galbraith and marked misattributed.

Random quote on Finance

Most quoted on finance:

In fact, without any exaggeration, the current mechanism of money creation through credit is certainly the "cancer" that's irretrievably eroding market economies of private property.

Maurice Allais

Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite.

Coluche

Many have been ruined by buying good Pennyworths.

Benjamin Franklin Poor Richard's Almanac. Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

The real reason that physicians are mediocre investors is that it never occurs to them that finance is a science, just like medicine.

William J. Bernstein The Four Pillars of Investing (2002)

The State owes all its citizens a secure subsistence, food, suitable clothes and a way of life that does not damage their health.

Montesquieu

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.

Arthur C. Clarke

Economists have never allowed their analysis to be influenced by psychologists of their time, but have always framed for themselves such assumptions about psychical processes as they have thought it desirable to make.

Joseph Schumpeter History of Economic Analysis (1945)

I don’t think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. Unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.

Robert Anton Wilson

Without question, the causes, which produce on the one hand long hours and overemployment, result on the other hand in short periods of work, underemployment, or unemployment.

Robert Hunter Poverty (1912)

Economics is more disciplinary than any other discipline, and it has been ever since its origins.

Antonio Negri and Antonio Negri in Multitude (2005)

By robbing Peter he paid Paul, he kept the moon from the wolves, and was ready to catch larks if ever the heavens should fall.

François Rabelais

A minimal guarantee with regards to income seems to me as almost inevitable.

Robert Reich

Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them.

Bertrand Russell In praise of idleness (1932)

For perhaps the first time in history, we have the resources, the know-how and the technology to make starvation and dependency relics of the past. But do we have the will?

Desmond Tutu

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations (1776)

Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources. In most societies, resources are allocated not by an all-powerful dictator but through the combined actions of millions of households and firms.

Greg Mankiw Principles of Economics (1998)

When people behave badly they always invent a philosophy of life which represents their bad actions to be not bad actions at all, but merely results of unalterable laws beyond their control.

Leo Tolstoy The Slavery of Our Times (1890)

Buy not what you want, but what you have need of; what you do not want is dear at a farthing.

Cato the Elder

Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

ECONOMY, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford.

Ambrose Bierce The Cynic's Dictionary (1906)

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