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" I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards - where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street - that there's no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, 'We've got a wonderful profit center.' "

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" 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. "

Paul Samuelson

Lesson

Art

Science

" 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. "

" Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does. "

" The dream of any scholar has, for me, come true by virtue of this award. The Nobel Prizes are justly famous in the hard sciences, in literature, and for peace. "

Paul Samuelson

Dream

Peace

" The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Good questions outrank easy answers. "

" My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words. "

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

" 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. "

" Rent control created deadweight loss. "

" 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. "

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

" I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it. "

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

" There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either. "

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

" The parts of physics that are exact are the parts of physics that are exact. The parts that are inexact are vastly greater. Sensible scientists don't waste their time pushing against doors that endlessly will not give. They are opportunistic and go where they can, but there are pitfalls in that. "

Paul Samuelson

Physics

Against

" I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression. "

" People have the wrong idea that God will forgive Reagan. They say he didn't know what he was doing. It's true he didn't know a lot of what was going on, but he was directly responsible. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 'There are no easy pickings.' That would be a more accurate, less dramatic statement than 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.' "

Paul Samuelson

Easy

Dramatic

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

Paul Samuelson

Politicians

People

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "