Joan Robinson Quotes

As capital is thus the most essential element in setting industry in motion, so it is by the amount of it, that the productiveness of that industry is chiefly determined.

An individual or a group of individuals might of course decide at any time that they would like to invest capital with the objective of acquiring still more capital. But, before a certain moment in historical time, it had never been easy for such individuals to do this successfully.

Capital brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays the golden eggs.

If financial assets no longer work for you at a rate far and above the rate of true wealth creation, then you must work longer for your money.

Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.

This dilettante notion that the global economy is evil because big corporate leaders make too much money... they do make too much money, but the only way we've figured out how to generate wealth in this world is through the market economy.

If a rich person invests in a business, either directly or through stock purchases, it means business can grow and hire more people.

A capitalist economy hums when leading businessmen are bubbling with animal spirits and are prepared to sink their money into risky ventures.

My job is making money, helping other people make money. I am spending money, trying to make sure more people get rich, because you cannot spend a lot of money, right? So my job is spending money, helping others. This is a headache.

The market is the creator of social wealth and the wellspring of self-sustaining economic development.

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.

The quantity of industry therefore not only increases in every country with the increase of the stock or capital which sets it in motion; but, in consequence of this increase, the division of labour becomes extended, new and more powerful implements and machines are invented, and the same quantity of labour is thus made to produce an infinitely greater quantity of commodities.

Gold that's put to use more gold begets.

A true capitalist doesn't have a job, because other people and other people's money work for them.

I prefer to take the view of businesspeople who are actually generating jobs and creating wealth.

Money is one of the elements of sovereignty.

Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.

Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and threepence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds.

It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.

Fortunes cannot grow; someone has to increase them.

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

Money must exist before it can be turned into capital.

Invest in as much of yourself as you can, you are your own biggest asset by far.

One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.

Conservatism must be based on allowing everyone to become an owner - equity for everyman.