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

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" Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen. "

" Avoiding inflation is not an absolute imperative but rather is one of a number of conflicting goals that we must pursue and that we may often have to compromise. "

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

" What is it that the scientist finds useful in being able to relate a positive description of behavior to the solution of a maximizing problem? That is what a good deal of my own early work was about. "

" I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction. "

" 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. "

Fork In The Road

" 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. "

" Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them. "

" A temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession. "

" I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray. "

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

" 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. "

" Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles. "

" In the jargon of American vaudeville, Professors Frisch and Tinbergen are a 'hard act to follow.' But then, all my life, I have been following such great scholars and policy advisors as these. "

" Women are men without money. "

" My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply. "

" In 1936, money had no important role. Interest rates were one-eighth of one-eighth of one per cent. I did some research, and I found that the interest on one million dollars of ninety-day Treasuries was $37. People didn't even bother to collect it. The Fed wasn't important. "

" Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes. "

" In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching. "

" 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. "

" I'm not speaking in favor of killing innovation. I'm speaking in favor of centrist use of the market, which involves necessarily a considerable degree of regulation. Markets by themselves will get themselves inevitably into inequality and into their own destruction. It will happen again and again. "

" 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. "

" Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself... Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government. "

" 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. "

" The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices. "

" I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate. "

" Rent control created deadweight loss. "

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

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

" 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. "