Adam Smith

• People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. 

• All money is a matter of belief.

• The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

• The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels the same effects may be more easily produced.

• What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?

    John Kenneth Galbraith

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

• It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.

• Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are not missed.

• If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

• Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.

    John Maynard Keynes

• I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. 

• A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

• It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

• The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones which ramify . . . into every corner of our minds.

• Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

    John Stuart Mill

• That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next. 

• That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

• The great creative individual. . . is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.

• They who know how to employ opportunities will often find that they can create them; and what we can achieve depends less on the amount of time we possess than on the use we make of our time.

• One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.

    Joseph Schumpeter

• The question that is so clearly in many potential parents' minds: "Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?" 

• We always plan too much and always think too little.

• The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily -- and perhaps most tellingly -- described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit.

• Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

• Entrepreneurial profit. . . is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production

Some additional Schumpeter Quotes

It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.
The Application of Probability to Conduct.

[Newton's] peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen through it.

Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.

I can't remember my telephone number, but I know it was in the high numbers.
Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections (Dublin 1993)

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
Quoted in K E Drexler, Engines of Creation: the Coming Era of Nanotechnology, (New York 1987) 231.

     Milton Friedman

• Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive. 

• What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system.

• The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

• The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.

• Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

    Thomas Malthus

• The histories of mankind . . . are histories only of the higher classes. 

• Virtue: to resist all temptation to evil.

• Population, when unchecked, increases in geometrical progression of such a nature as to double itself every twenty-five years.

• Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.

• [Survival is] the perpetual struggle for room and food.

    Thorstein Veblen

• In point of substantial merit -- the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing and dancing. 

• The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

• Invention is the mother of necessity.

• The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.

• All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage.