Economics Quotes

“Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.”

E. F. Schumacher

“The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.”

“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”

Alfred Marshall

“The price of every thing rises and falls from time to time and place to place; and with every such change the purchasing power of money changes.”

Alfred Marshall

“In the long run we are all dead.”

John Maynard Keynes

“There's no such thing as a free lunch.”

Milton Friedman

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

“This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”

Joseph Schumpeter

“Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.”

Paul Krugman

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it.”

“Stability is destabilizing.”

Hyman Minsky

"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

Frederic Bastiat

"History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics."

B. R. Ambedkar

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.”

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.”

Laurence J. Peter

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”

“He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.”