Economic Wisdom Quotes

It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.

Be saving, but not at the cost of all liberality. Have the soul of a king and the hand of a wise economist.

There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: 'In the long run we are all dead.' And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.

It is sheer folly when all is gone to lose even one's passage money.

Can the amazing national debt be paid by a little trifling sum squeezed from year to year out of America?.... Would it not be much superior wisdom, and sounder policy, for a distressed kingdom to retrench the vast unnecessary expenses continually incurred by its enormous vices?

Tis a well spent penny that saves a groat.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

Be niggards of advice on no pretense; For the worst avarice is that of sense.

Passive commerce . . . should thus . . . [compel us] to content ourselves with the first price of our commodities, and to see the profits of our trade snatched from us, to enrich our enemies and persecutors. That unequalled spirit of enterprise . . . an inexhaustible mine of national wealth, would be stifled and lost; and poverty and disgrace would overspread a country, which, with wisdom, might make herself the admiration and envy of the world.

Our biggest challenge is to eliminate the popular perception that economists don't have anything useful to say.

There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.

I don't think Warren Buffett should be the treasurer or whatever. Warren Buffett's nuts! Just because he's a freaking billionaire doesn't mean he has common sense.

As a preacher, I should be prompted to tell men, not so much how to get their wheat bread cheaper, as of the bread of life compared with which that is bran. Let a man only taste these loaves, and he becomes a skillful economist at once.

As much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it.