Alfred Marshall Quotes

Insecure managers create complexity. Frightened, nervous managers use thick convoluted planning books and busy slides filled with everything they’ve known since childhood……. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simple minded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse. Clear, tough minded people are the most simple.

I'm not currently into economic textbooks, but my grandchildren tell me that the book by Gregory Mankiw, former head of the white house council of economic advisers is a model of intelligence and clarity. Why not try that one.

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

Books do not make life easier or more simple, but harder and more interesting.

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be. The first book in the field that I ever read was Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall. I suppose subsequently I would have to pick out Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx.

95 percent of economics is common sense made complicated, and even for the remaining 5 percent, the essential reasoning, if not all the technical details, can be explained in plain terms.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

My natural tendency is to complicate everything--and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.

It's really complex to make something simple.

You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

Economics is not an exact science.

The Simple Life is not a simple life.

It's all very simple, or else it's all very complex, or perhaps it's neither, or both.

Between the semi-educated, who offer simplistic answers to complex questions, and the overeducated, who offer complicated answers to simple questions, it is a wonder that any questions get satisfactorily answered at all.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!

I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Nature's way is simple and easy, but men prefer the intricate and artificial.

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book.

The method of science depends on our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable, even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification-the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist's domain-is infinitely more daunting.

It's simple until you make it complicated.

One rule is to not use complicated techniques unless they are necessary to achieve your goal. First, use simple movements, and if they don't work, then introduce the more complex ones.