Robert J. Shiller Quotes

We certainly want those at the top to do well, but if you base your entire presidency and your entire economic platform on helping them do even better, you're missing what makes the economy tick. Because not everyone has been as fortunate as Mitt Romney, you cannot base your whole approach on a life experience as rarified as his.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.

We are one of the richest countries in the world, and there is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to live in poverty.

I would like to solemnly reaffirm, that poverty is not a fatality.

Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.

The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few threatens the ability of ordinary people to raise their voices and have a say over how our societies are run.

What good is a high GDP if some, or even many, Americans are left behind?

There's no future in being poor.

Most of the time in America, we're surrounded by oppressive inequality such that the wealthiest 1 percent collectively own substantially more than the bottom 90 percent. One escape from that is America's wild places.

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

No person can maximize the American Dream on the minimum wage.

The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.

We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don't accept is the idea that some folks won't even get a chance.

I do care about not 99 percent or 95 percent. I care about the very rich and the very poor. I care about 100 percent of America.

We have concentrated wealth and capital to such a degree that the vast majority of us don't have the discretionary dollars to make our economy go and grow.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

People naturally long for a bit of the wealth that is whorling all around them, and if the work and education available to them won't get them closer to the comforts that they see others enjoying, the temptation to take shortcuts can be fierce.

The Democratic Party has gotten narrower and it's gotten smaller and it's fundamentally wrong on all the key questions involving the economic future of this country and our hopes of prosperity. And many Americans are beginning to realize that.

I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn't have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person's existence.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford.

The poor should not have to learn how to be frugal and the rich should not have to learn to be extravagant.

Preventing poverty beats curing it.