George Soros Quotes

People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them.

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.

There is no such thing as quantitative economics.

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.

Political economy has only become a science since it has been confined to the results of inductive investigation.

In economics, you always want to ask 'And then what?'

Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.

Of course, no matter how hard we try to be objective as reporters, our life experiences and personal circumstances influence our journalism, including the choice of topics we pursue.

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

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.

Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.

The ability to work with systems of general equilibrium is perhaps one of the most important skills of the economist - a skill which he shares with many other scientists, but in which he has perhaps a certain comparative advantage.

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.

All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.

I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems.

For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.

Science demands objective factual evidence - proof; spiritual experience is subjective and leads to faith.

[The notion of equilibrium] is a notion which can be employed usefully in varying degrees of looseness. It is an absolutely indispensable part of the toolbag of the economist and one which he can often contribute usefully to other sciences which are occasionally apt to get lost in the trackless exfoliations of purely dynamic systems.

Mathematical economics is old enough to be respectable, but not all economists respect it. It has powerful supporters and impressive testimonials, yet many capable economists deny that mathematics, except as a shorthand or expository device, can be applied to economic reasoning. There have even been rumors that mathematics is used in economics (and in other social sciences) either for the deliberate purpose of mystification or to confer dignity upon common places as French was once used in diplomatic communications.

An economist is a man that can tell you...what can happen under any given condition, and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's too.

- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. -Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.

Economics has been called the dismal science. Once you get to understand it, you may not find it so dismal, but you don't find it much of a science either.

What's happening is merely what's happening. How you feel about it is another matter.

Before economics can progress, it must abandon its suicidal formalism.