Top 30 Paul Samuelson Quotes

It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn’t called a decade of greed.

The contrafactual history is what it would have been the other way. Think of the Kennedy triumph in the missiles crisis. Worked out fine. Khrushchev blinked and so forth. The other road, you don’t want to think too hard about. You could have had nuclear missiles wiping out a tenth of the globe.

To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.

Keynes’s contribution was not just to advocate spending government money in the middle of a recession. Every government had done that going back to the days of the Irish potato famine. What he gave to us was a way of thinking about the magnitude and the dimensions and so forth.

We’ve become a debtor nation. I don’t mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.

I have not been able in one lecture even to scratch the surface of the role of maximum principles in analytic economics.

Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

Women are men without money.

In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history.

The history of the twentieth century – America’s century! – has been pretty much a history of rising prices.

American society was economically ill-run in the 1980s. Our society has been on a consumption binge. If the American people had a town meeting and said, ‘What do we care about posterity? Posterity hasn’t done anything for us; we’re going to whoop it up now,’ that is a rational judgment. But nobody ever did that.

People had J.F.K. all wrong. They thought of him as a dashing, deciding type. He was an extremely hesitant person who checked the ice in front of him all the time.

Rent control created deadweight loss.

When I was a kid, I reckoned things in Hershey bars. Is this worth three Hershey bars to me?

I can’t think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.

Time is our ultimate scarcity. Isaac Newton can give us more electricity, but he can’t give us more than 24 hours of the day of time. And so we’re constantly having to sacrifice alternate activities to get the one that pleases us most.

Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.

It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.

Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.

Things swept so badly that I had distrust – after 1967, let’s say – of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.

Investing should be dull. It shouldn’t be exciting.

You’re not making a decision if you come to a fork in the road. There is no ‘it’ to take. It’s one or the other.

Milton Friedman. Friedman had a solid MV = PQ doctrine from which he deviated very little all his life. By the way, he’s about as smart a guy as you’ll meet. He’s as persuasive as you hope not to meet.

The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas.

Let me acknowledge that I realize that, in honoring me, the Committee of the Royal Academy of Sciences is in fact saying a good word for all of those of my generation who have been laboring in the same vineyard.

I decided that there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business, as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon: behind the bar and not in front of it.

Funeral by funeral, theory advances.

It is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.

The remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do.