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

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

" One of the pleasing things about science is that we do all climb towards the heavens on the shoulders of our predecessors. Economics, like physics, has its heroes, and the letter 'H' that I used in my mathematical equations was not there to honor Sir William Hamilton, but rather Harold Hotelling. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Rent control created deadweight loss. "

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

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

" What I say is, 'If you're so rich, how come you're so dumb?' "

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

" 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. "

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

" Every good cause is worth some inefficiency. "

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

" What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much. "

" Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?' "

" U.S. capital formation, which has been pretty high in the '90s and very high in the late 1990s, is what is being financed by the savings of the rest of the world, generally poorer than ourselves, because our deficit on current account, chronic deficit, is their surplus, and they have been willingly bringing that to the American market. "

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

" 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. "

" Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise. "

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

" The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows. "

" 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. "

" 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. "