French Economist Quotes

Frédéric Bastiat

Maurice Allais

François Quesnay

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

Léon Walras

Thomas Piketty

Jacques Attali

Everywhere the strong have made the laws and oppressed the weak; and, if they have sometimes consulted the interests of society, they have always forgotten those of humanity.

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.

Frédéric Bastiat

Common wisdom holds that the most complicated thing in the universe (asides fom the universe itself) is the human brain. In actual fact, however, other objects are even more complex – starting with human society, especially today's hypermodern society, a product of thousands and even billions of human brains; not to forget globalisation and the Internet.

To secure the greatest amount of pleasure with the least possible outlay should be the aim of all economic effort... when everyone does this the natural order, instead of being endangered, will be all the better assured.

François Quesnay

Only communist regimes have churned out more jargon than modern business.

According to the dictionary, to administer is to govern, or to manage a public or private business. It means, therefore, to seek to make the best possible use of the resources available in achieving the goal of the enterprise. Administration includes, therefore, all the operations of the enterprise. But as a result of the usual way of organizing things to facilitate the running of the business, a certain number of activities constitute the special departments; the technical department, the commercial department, the financial department, etc., and the scope of the administrative department is found to be reduced accordingly.

Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained. The more abstract his theory, the more imperative this obligation.
In fact, mathematics are and can only be a tool to explore reality. In this exploration, mathematics do not constitute an end in itself, they are and can only be a means.

Man's tragedy is that when he can do something, in the end he will always do it

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.