Economy Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

An ecological approach to the economy is about having enough, not having more.

John Bellamy Foster

Ten per cent of our neighbours survive on charity. 10 per cent of Canadians eat through charity. 10 per cent. Surely if you were prime minister or minister of trade or of industry, you would wake up each day thinking that, for reasons that escape you, the central policy chosen to drive the economy is not working. It is not working because it is not meeting the needs of a democracy in which legitimacy lies with the citizenry.

John Ralston Saul

The great political questions take their place in the psychic economy of the typical citizen with those leisure-hour interests that have not yet attained the rank of hobbies, and with the subjects of irresponsible conversation.

Joseph Schumpeter

They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called the Nastic out of a mistranslation of the Nastic's word for space —to a wary truce. After that they fought one another.

M. John Harrison

Quantum theory is stunningly successful. Not a single one of the theory's predictions has ever been shown wrong. One-third of our economy depends on products based on it. However, the worldview demanded by quantum theory is not only stranger than we might suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose.

Bruce Rosenblum

These differences in moral vision and map-making bred, In turn, conflicting institutional needs and social policies, within the constraints of an under-developed economy and society in terms of Western standards. Though both were 'backward-looking', the hierarchical and theocratic Byzantine ideal with its cultural affinity to Orthodox Tsarism, lent itself to a rural and patriarchal society whose political institutions would be subordinated to the religious controls of the clergy and their supporters among the notables; their suspicions of the West would be compensated by the eastward drive inherent in the Megali Idea and its dream of a restored Byzantine empire in Anatolia and the Aegean. Whereas the Hellenic vision,

Anthony D. Smith

What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. Going to jail for distributing leaflets advocating war tax refusal causes a ripple of thought, of conscience among us all. And of remembrance too. …. There may be ever improving standards of living in the U.S., with every worker eventually owning his own home and driving his own car; but our modern economy is based on preparation for war. … The absolutist begins a work, others take it up and try to spread it. Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.

As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.

Television's quasi-hypnotic effect is one reason that the political economy supported by the television industry is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism that thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.
Our systematic exposure to fear and other arousal stimuli on television can be exploited by the clever public relations specialist, advertiser, or politician.

Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise.

With a perfect economy, Nature turns all forces to account.

Herbert Spencer

When people were committed to the idea that in the field of religion only one plan must be adopted, bloody wars resulted. With the acknowledgment of the principle of religious freedom these wars ceased. The market economy safeguards peaceful economic co-operation because it does not use force upon the economic plans of the citizens. If one master plan is to be substituted for the plans of each citizen, endless fighting must emerge. Those who disagree with the dictator's plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.

Ludwig von Mises

I myself have no doubt in the past tended to appear to many to be more concerned with the creation of wealth than with its distribution. I must confess that there is a degree of truth in this, but to the extent that it is true, it has been because of my conviction that the rapid growth of the economy, and the pressure that comes with it on demand for labour, both produces a rapid and substantial redistribution of income directly of itself and also makes it possible to assist more generously those who are not, from misfortune temporary or permanent, sharing in the general advance. The history of our last fifteen years or so demonstrates this conclusively.

John James Cowperthwaite

Most managers have some conception of at least some of the types of decisions they must make. Their conceptions, however, are likely to be deficient in a very critical way, a way that follows from an important principle of scientific economy: The less we understand a phenomenon, the more variables we require to explain it.

Russell L. Ackoff

The main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun.

The concept of man as mass robot was both an expression of and a powerful motive force in industrialized mass society. It was the basis for behavioural engineering in commercial, economic, political and other advertising and propaganda; the expanding economy of the 'affluent society' could not subsist without such manipulation. Only by manipulating humans ever more into Skinnerian rats, robots buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformers and opportunists (or, bluntly speaking, into morons and zombies) can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

If commerce is the engine of our economy, then advertising is the spark. Responsible advertisers are the drivers who keep us on the right track, leading to a richer, more benevolent society.

High taxes, over-regulation, and an anti-business attitude are clearly the cause of our economic problems. Our economy is floundering, and too many Marylanders have been struggling, just to get by. 40 consecutive tax hikes have taken an additional $10 billion out of the pockets of struggling Maryland families and small businesses. We've lost more than 8,000 businesses, and Maryland's unemployment nearly doubled.

The idea of abolishing Income Tax is to me highly attractive, both on other grounds & because it tends to public economy.

William Ewart Gladstone

Price fixing does not represent simply windfall gains and losses to particular groups according to whether the price happens to be set higher or lower than it would be otherwise. It represents a net lose to the economy as a whole to the extent that many transactions do not take place at all, because the mutually acceptable possibilities have been reduced.

Mundell's models allowed a significant role for fiscal policy, especially under fixed exchange rates. However, the treatment was entirely Keynesian—an increased budget deficit operated solely by raising the aggregate demand for goods. Moreover, increases in government spending and cuts in taxes had pretty much the same effect on the economy.

No serious challenge on the Left exists to Third Way thinking anywhere in the world. This is hardly surprising as globalisation punishes hard any country that tries to run its economy by ignoring the realities of the market or prudent public finances. In this strictly narrow sense, and in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all "Thatcherite" now.

Peter Mandelson

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.

Hunter S. Thompson

Canada was built from its very beginnings on the belief that public leadership in the economy and on social issues would be as effective and cheap as anything done by the private sector.

John Ralston Saul

In a free-market economy, the consumer is king: labor unions don't run things, business people don't run things, bankers don't run things, politicians don't run things, but the success of a business depends on how people spend their money.