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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:

Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science.

Paul Samuelson

Economically, as long as we (Trinidad and Tobago) are not beaten down by the (SARS-CoV-2) virus in 2022, our economy should improve.

Keith Rowley Keith Rowley (2021)

Putin operates a "protection racket"... that severely punishes disloyalty while allowing access to economic predation on a world-historic scale for the inner core of his elite.

Karen Dawisha Putin's Kleptocracy (2014)

If there is one single area of economics in which path dependence is unmistakable, it is in economic geography – the location of production in space.

Paul Krugman

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

Herman E. Daly to Herman Daly in: Tristan Clark (2007)

The importance of oaks both in the economy and in the forest ecosystem is big, but the exceptional part is that this tree plays in the old beliefs and legends.

Marek Żukow-Karczewski

When a politician, on a subject implicating science — hard science, economic science, social science — says, ‘The debate is over,’ you may be sure of two things. It’s that the debate is raging and he’s losing it.

George Will

I find it increasingly difficult to take Mr Benn seriously as an economics minister.

Roy Jenkins

To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst.

Bob Black The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

Calculations are to the economic science what bones are to the human body. Without them it will always be a vague and confused science, at the mercy of error and prejudice.

François Quesnay

This year's economic performance is encouraging as a result of the reopening of the economy in line with a shift to a COVID-19 endemic phase.

Anwar Ibrahim Anwar Ibrahim (2023)

A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people—and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools.

John Taylor Gatto

For Marx, ‘pure’ economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible.

Ernest Mandel Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

No! But they were here [in Los Angeles]. Here they were surprised, because it was difficult to finance, the film. A lot of the executives would say, 'I just don't get it.'

Meryl Streep Meryl Streep: Movies, marriage, and turning sixty (2009)

Economics is in high degree a pedagogical discipline, and an economist must be in close touch with popular psychology in order to know what ought to be said at any particular moment.

Gustav Cassel

Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between direct and indirect taxation holds a minor, though important place.

William Ewart Gladstone Letter to his brother Robertson of the Financial Reform Association at Liverpool (1859)

I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems.

Kenneth Boulding

The president has very little effect on the economy. If you want to put blame or credit, the main person who influences the business cycle is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Robert Fogel

All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Du principe Fédératif [Principle of Federation (1863)

[W]hether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.

Walter Lippmann A Preface to Morals (1929)

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