“Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.”

Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case.

The Economic Problem, the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.

It is a good thing to make mistakes so long as you’re found out quickly.

The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts which we can assume to be known more or less for certain, and partly future events which can only be forecasted with more or less confidence.

Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?

The destruction of the inducement to invest by an excessive liquidity-preference was the outstanding evil, the prime impediment to the growth of wealth, in the ancient and medieval worlds.

It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.

It’s not bringing in the new ideas that’s so hard; it’s getting rid of the old ones.

Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel – these are things which should in their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible and above all let finance be primarily national.

Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.

Men will not always die quietly.

Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.

The principle objectives in life are love, the creation and enjoyment if aesthetic experience, the pursuit of knowledge. Love comes a long way first.

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

It is a misfortune of the times that all of us must needs be amateur economists-including, and perhaps especially, the professionals.

I’m an economist by training. I don’t really work as an economist. I only worked briefly as an economist.

For those of you who may be unaware, [Michael] Boskin is the economist/weasel/fraud who helped to officially distort the CPI, making it more or less worthless as a measure of inflation.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

I’m a better economist than I was a sax player.

All economists should be locked up until they admit that they don’t know what they’re talking about.