Paul Samuelson Quotes

Good questions outrank easy answers.

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.

Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.

Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.

Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.

A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.

Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer.

Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

Kelsoism is not accepted by modern scientific economics as a valid and fruitful analysis of the distribution of income but rather it is regarded as an amateurish and cranky fad.

Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they'll all turn over together.

You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.

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

Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.

Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.

The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.

Funeral by funeral, theory advances.

I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.

This message (that attempting to beat the market is futile) can never be sold on Wall Street because it is in effect telling stock analysts to drop dead.

Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

When the economy was going up, [Milton Friedman and I] both gave the same advice, and when the economy was going down, we gave the same advice. But in between he didn't change his advice at all.

The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows.

Two-thirds of a century after [The Road to Serfdom] got written, hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.

Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.

But the trouble is that he [Alan Greenspan] had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.

You could be disqualified for a job [at Harvard] if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?

Forsake search for needles that are so very small in haystacks that are so very large.

Econometrics may be defined as the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.

Marshall's crime is to pretend to handle imperfect competition with tools only applicable to perfect competition.

Economists have much to be humble about.

Thousands of important and intelligent men have never been able to grasp the principle of comparative advantage or believe it even after it was explained to them

It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.

Man does not live by GNP alone.

Perhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently - logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.

Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

It isn't that greed's increased. What's increased is the realization that you've got a free field to reach out for what you'd like to do.

I couldn't reconcile what I was being taught at the university of Chicago, the lectures and the books I was being assigned, with what I knew to be true out in the streets.

We are like highly trained athletes, who never run a race.

The consumer, so it is said, is the king each is a voter who uses his money as votes to get the things done that he wants done.

Investing is like waiting for paint dry and grass grow so. If you like fun, let handle 800 USD and headed to Las Vegas

Reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.

For better or worse, US Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian. You know what a cafeteria catholic is?

Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.

It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.

I can't think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.

The dream of any scholar has, for me, come true by virtue of this award. The Nobel Prizes are justly famous in the hard sciences, in literature, and for peace.