Definitions

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest.
-Adam Smith

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
- Albert Einstein

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
- George Bernard Shaw

When men are employed they are best contented.
- Benjamin Franklin

Our necessities are few but our wants are endless.
- Fortune Cookie

Investment is a flighty bird which needs to be controlled.
- J.R. Hicks

Nothing so weakens a government as inflation.
- J.K. Galbraith

Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show the abysmal ignorance of the participants?
- Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate

We might as well reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by demand or supply.
- Alfred Marshall

Love of money is the root of all evil.
- The New Testament

Lack of money is the root of of all evil.
- George Bernard Shaw

The truth is never pure and rarely simple.
- Oscar Wilde

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
- Aldous Huxley

Money is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it.
- J.S. Mill

All decent people live beyond their incomes, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's incomes. A few gifted individuals manage to do both.
- Saki

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
- Herbert Hoover

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
- Martin Luther King

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
- Syrus (1st century B.C.)

There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.
- Adlai Stevenson

The best way to ruin a country is to debauch its currency.
- Vladimir Lenin

The free enterprise system is absolutely too important to be left to the competitive forces of the marketplace.
- U.S. Senator

When buying and selling is controlled by legislation, the first ones to be bought are the legislators.
- Anonymous

Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.
- Adam Smith

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
- Lord Thomas Macauley

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
- Karl Marx

Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
- Karl Marx

There is always enough for the needy, there is never enough for the greedy.
- Mahatma Gandhi

No nation was ever ruined by trade.
- Benjamin Franklin

Everything's a trade-off. If you want a high standard of living, you have to settle for a low quality of life.
- Anonymous

Inflation is like toothpaste. Once it's out, you can hardly get it back in again.
- Karl Pohl, former West German central banker

A recession is when your neighbor is out of work. A depression is when you are out of work.
- Harry Truman

The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life.
- J.R. Hicks

Protectionism is the institutionalization of economic failure.
- Edward Heath

Next to bombing, rent control is the most effective technique so far known for destroying cities.
- Assar Lindbeck

Supply creates its own demand.
- J.B. Say

There have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking.
- Will Rogers

The value of a yellow metal (gold), originally chosen as money because it tickled the fancy of savages, is clearly a chancy and irrelevant thing on which to base the value of our money and the stability of our industrial system.
- D.H. Robertson

Gold is a sideshow.
- Paul Samuelson

Neither a state nor a bank ever have had unrestricted power of issuing paper money without abusing that power.
- David Ricardo

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor.
- Adam Smith

People in the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in some contrivance to raise prices.
- Adam Smith

Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the proletariat.
- George Bernard Shaw

Buy land. They ain't making any more of the stuff.
- Will Rogers

The economy of the future might be called the "spaceman economy," in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything.
- Kenneth Boulding

Government is an art, not a science, and an adventure, not a planned itinerary.
- Donald Creighton

Democracy will defeat the economist at every turn on its own genre.
- Harold Innis

It is very odd that, enjoying one of the highest living standards in the world, Canadians in all walks of life should nevertheless believe that their economy is a frail, hothouse creation.
- John Dales

Teach a parrot to say demand and supply, and you have created an economist.
- Anonymous

We have one asset, and that's people.
- Sylvia Ostry

I have observed that we all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter.
- Bat Masterson

As capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse.
- Karl Marx

Inflation is the time when those who have saved for a rainy day get soaked.
- Anonymous

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation, the second is war. Both bring temporary prosperity; both bring permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
- Ernest Hemingway

In the long run we are all dead.
- John Maynard Keynes