PAUL SAMUELSON

Good questions outrank easy answers.

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.

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.

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

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

Funeral by funeral, theory advances.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Every good cause is worth some inefficiency

Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?

I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.

To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.

A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession.

Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.

Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'

People had J.F.K. all wrong. They thought of him as a dashing, deciding type. He was an extremely hesitant person who checked the ice in front of him all the time.

I have not been able in one lecture even to scratch the surface of the role of maximum principles in analytic economics.

'There are no easy pickings.' That would be a more accurate, less dramatic statement than 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.'

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