Robert Heilbroner Quotes

economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.

Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy.

Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

Economics is a social science, not a physical science.

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.

There is no such thing as quantitative economics.

Among the social sciences, economists are the snobs. Economics, with its numbers and graphs and curves, at least has the coloration and paraphernalia of a hard science. It's not just putting on sandals and trekking out to take notes on some tribe.

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

I'm a better economist than I was a sax player.

Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.

Economics is a form of brain damage.

A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.

I'm a Ph.D. in economics, and so you analyze every situation uniquely because every international situation is unique.

As an undergraduate at UBC in Canada, I fell in love with economic theory. It was the right choice for me.

Well, as you've said, we cannot expect the people of China not to want to progress, so if you have an opportunity to progress, to develop your economy to a world class economy, it's an aspiration that is natural and that, I welcome.

People today don't become economists to make the world a better place.

I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.

My interest in economics has always been in the whole corpus of economic theory, the interrelationships between the various fields of theory and their relevance for the formulation of economic policy.

In my long life, I have known some great economists, but I have never counted myself among their number nor walked in their company.

The primary role of the economist is to find out the truth about the real world.

The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.

I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.

I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray.