19th-century Economist Quotes

John Maynard Keynes

Ludwig von Mises

Alfred Marshall

Joseph Schumpeter

Frédéric Bastiat

William Stanley Jevons

Carl Menger

The inlet of a man's mind is what he learns; the outlet is what he accomplishes. If his mind is not fed by a continued supply of new ideas which he puts to work with purpose, and if there is no outlet in action, his mind becomes stagnant. Such a mind is a danger to the individual who owns it and is useless to the community.

Censorship may be useful for the preservation of morality, but can never be so for its restoration.

Every improvement in our conceptions of justice, as well as in the machinery for the administration of justice, whereby a closer approximation to exact justice may be secured, will make for social peace, though the mere adjudication of conflicting interests will not remove the conflicts themselves nor their cause. That lies deeper than legislatures or courts can probe.

Thomas Nixon Carver

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.

Material goods consist of useful material things, and of all rights to hold, or use, or derive benefits from material things, or to receive them at a future time.

Alfred Marshall

Looking back the great American 'stabilization' [and boom] of 1922-1929 was really a vast attempt to destabilize the value of money in terms of human effort by means of a colossal program of investment [driven by too easy credit]... which succeeded for a surprisingly long period, but which no human ingenuity could have managed to direct indefinitely on sound and balanced lines.

Dennis Holme Robertson

Sleep is no servant of the will; it has caprices of its own; when courted most, it lingers still; when most pursued, 'tis swiftly gone.

If once the mind is thoroughly penetrated with the knowledge that money is only a tool, invented for one specific purpose, the heavy cloud of obscurity, may I add, of repulsiveness which lowers over currency will vanish away.

It took from a hundred to a hundred and fifty or two hundred years for the astronomy of Kepler to become the astronomy of Newton and Laplace, and for the mechanics of Galileo to become the mechanics of d'Alembert and Lagrange. On the other hand, less than a century has elapsed between the publication of Adam Smith's work and the contributions of Cournot, Gossen, Jevons, and myself.

Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight?
Who blushes at the name?

John Kells Ingram

War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.

Gustave de Molinari

Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.

On October 16, 1929

The new morality does not consist in saving but in expanding consumption.

[Things] are as they are, because they were as they were.

William Hurrell Mallock

As has been stated, the purpose of money is to split barter into two parts so that the seller is free to find his source of supply later and elsewhere. This is the sole purpose of money. Any effort to use money to serve another purpose is perversive; and this statement condemns the entire managed money philosophy.

The United States economy is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and where the other fellows can stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit runs out the game will stop.

Marriner Stoddard Eccles

There can never be in human knowledge any such thing as finality. Always at the end there is a mystery; it will always be there.

Probability may be described, agreeably to general usage, as importing partial incomplete belief.

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

The surplus of society overrides all our traditions and shapes all our philosophies.

There is one class of men who from time to time have taken a keen and practical interest in the constitution of the Family, and they are the Statesmen. They have realized how intimately the welfare of the State depends upon the influence and nature of the Families from which it is constituted; and they have endeavoured that the State in turn should mould and influence the Family to its own purposes.

Helen Bosanquet

In scientific experimentation we control everything that happens. We determine when it shall occur and where. We arrange circumstances and surroundings, atmosphere and temperatures; possible ways of getting in and possible ways of getting out. We take something that has been in, or put in something that has been out, and see what happens.

Franklin Henry Giddings

We cannot afford to have any large section of the business world in doubt whether they have broken the laws or not, and we cannot let the laws become a dead letter through vagueness. In this view it is clear that an administrative commission can render invaluable service.

John Bates Clark

Man, the molecule of society, is the subject of social science.

Henry Charles Carey

The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stocking for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for a steadily decreasing amount of effort.

Joseph Schumpeter

For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.

John Maynard Keynes