Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Economics
-
“Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship 'economic growth' — the ultimate unreality in a finite world.”
-
“Yes. It's all very simple. I want you to abolish economists ... Yes, all of them. They never agree on anything. They just fill the heads of politicians with all sorts of curious notions, like the more you spend, the richer you get.”
-
“ You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.”
-
“Commercial concerns have expanded from family business to corporate wealth which is self-perpetuating and which enlightened statesmen and economists now dread as the most potent oligarchy yet produced.”
-
“Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice. A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste ... ”
-
“Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.”
-
“Economics anxiety may be even more common than the often identified 'math anxiety,' for unlike math, which has its personal uses, economics is seen as a mysterious set of forces manipulated from above.”
-
“Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.”
-
“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”
-
“All forms of slavery had their inception in some kind of economic dependence, but the slavery often exists long after the dependent condition has passed away. A thing, once established, once made an institution, is very apt to outlast the economic phase which determined its existence, and become a very troublesome matter. Institutions are crystallized ideas; they stand still: people grow — grow beyond and outside of them. Yet there they remain, unwieldy, mischief-breeding; to get rid of them at all is to tear them out by the roots at great cost of life and suffering. The bonds made ages ago, by economic conditions prevailing at the time, have become sacred; they bear another strength than that which they possessed when first formed. Though no longer with any economical basis for existing, they are even more effective in power than when first established.”
-
“Inflation is the senility of democracies.”
-
“A 'mixed economy' is a society in the process of committing suicide.”
-
“We've had trickle down economics in the country for ten years now, and most of us aren't even damp yet.”
-
“Economics and ethics have little in common.”
-
“What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them.”
-
“Economics has not yet had a Thales, an Archimedes, or a Lavoisier.”
-
“The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.”
-
“What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.”
-
“In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. ... but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.”
-
“I doubt whether there is any subject in the world of equal importance that has received so little serious and articulate consideration as the economic status of the family — of its members in relation to each other and of the whole unit in relation to the other units of which the community is made up.”
-
“... of the family as an economic unit — something which has its own claim, based on its own value to the nation, to its own share in the nation's wealth — there has been next to no consideration at all.”
-
“Pluck from under the family all the props which religion and morality have given it, strip it of the glamour, true or false, cast round it by romance, it will still remain a prosaic, indisputable fact, that the whole business of begetting, bearing and rearing children, is the most essential of all the nation's businesses.”
-
“A sound economy is a sound understanding brought into action: it is calculation realized; it is the doctrine of proportion reduced to practice; it is foreseeing consequences, and guarding against them; it is expecting contingencies and being prepared for them.”
-
“The 'American dream' ... means an economy in which people who work hard can get ahead and each new generation lives better than the last one. The 'American dream' also means a democratic political system in which most people feel they can affect public decisions and elect officials who will speak for them. In recent years, the dream has been fading.”
-
“The federal budget deficit is the biggest single impediment to revitalizing the American economy.”
-
“... most economists, like doctors, are reluctant to make predictions, and those who make them are seldom accurate. The economy, like the human body, is a highly complex system whose workings are not thoroughly understood.”
-
“[On inflation:] The disease is painless; it's the cure that hurts.”
-
“[Economists' advice] is something like patent medicine — people know it is largely manufactured by quacks and that a good percentage of the time it won't work, but they continue to buy the brand whose flavor they like.”
-
“Economics lie at the very root of practical morality.”
-
“But with the slow menace of a glacier, depression came on. No one had any measure of its progress; no one had any plan for stopping it. Everyone tried to get out of its way.”
-
“One of the soundest rules I try to remember when making forecasts in the field of economics — a profession which is still far more an art than a science — is that whatever is to happen is happening already.”
-
“Only by transforming our own economy to one of peace can we make possible economic democracy in the Third World or our own country. The present economy generates wars to protect its profits and its short-term interests, while squandering the future. Unless we transform the economy, we cannot end war.”
-
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”
-
“A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. It is characteristic of a crisis in theory that cranks get a hearing from the public which orthodoxy is failing to satisfy.”
-
“Where is the pricing system that offers the consumer a fair choice between air to breathe and motor cars to drive about in?”
-
“Not only subjective poverty is never overcome by growth, but absolute poverty is increased by it. ... Absolute misery grows while wealth increases.”
-
“Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.”
-
“Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.”
-
“A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.”
-
“The first essential for economists ... is to ... combat, not foster, the ideology which pretends that values which can be measured in terms of money are the only ones that ought to count.”
-
“[On economics:] As a pure subject it is too difficult to be a rewarding object of study; the beauty of mathemetics and the satisfaction of discoveries in the natural sciences are denied to the practitioners of this scrappy, uncertain, ill-disciplined subject.”
-
“The very nature of economics is rooted in nationalism. ... It [was] developed ... in the hope of throwing light upon questions of policy. But policy means nothing unless there is an authority to carry it out, and authorities are national.”
-
“Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.”
-
“... economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.”
-
“Unequal distribution of income is an excessively uneconomic method of getting the necessary saving done.”
-
“... owning capital is not a productive activity.”
-
“One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was ... a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society.”
-
“So much for the rising tide that lifts all boats. It lifts only yachts.”
-
“Clothes, manner, and to a certain extent morals are the products of the economic life of the times.”
-
“My ideal is that we all be economically interdependent. We should not be independent like millionaires, nor dependent like laborers. My ideal is that we all be interdependent.”
-
“The IMF, World Bank and WTO work together in an iron triangle to carry out the corporate agenda of privatization, deregulation, and 'free trade.' Although the World Bank and IMF were originally founded to be part of the United Nations, they have always been controlled by bankers and economists from the United States and Europe. ... Global economic justice is not just ethical; it is key to reversing the demise of our ecosystems, our spirituality, our connection with nature, our health, our children's future, and humanity itself.”
-
“What do the Asian financial crisis, one billion people on the brink of starvation, $2.5 trillion in international debt, the decline of every major ecosystem on the planet, and sweatshops have in common? They are all outcomes of a global economy designed by the IMF, World Bank, and the WTO which caters to the interests of transnational corporations above and beyond the interests of all other aspects of life.”
-
“I learned that economics was not an exact science and that the most erudite men would analyze the economic ills of the world and derive a totally different conclusion.”
-
“While the concept of human development is beginning to assume a dominant position in the thinking of international economists and administrators, the Market Economy, not merely adorned with capital letters but seen in an almost mystic haze, is increasingly regarded by many governments as the quick and certain way to material prosperity. It is assumed that economic measures can resolve all the problems facing their countries. ... When economics is regarded as 'the most important key to every lock of every door,' it is only natural that the worth of man should come to be decided largely, even wholly, by his effectiveness as an economic tool. This is at variance with the vision of a world where eocnomic, political and social institutions work to serve man, instead of the other way round ...”
-
“The personal is not just political. It is also economic.”
-
“... observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.”
-
“We think of the experiments of particle physicists and space explorers as being extraordinarily expensive, and so they are. But the costs are as nothing compared with the incomprehensibly huge resources that banks, industries, governments and international institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations have poured into tests of macro-economic theory. Never has a science, or supposed science, been so generously indulged. And never have experiments left in their wakes more wreckage, unpleasant surprises, blasted hopes and confusion, to the point that the question seriously arises whether the wreckage is reparable ...”
-
“The primary conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.”
-
“Innovating economies expand and develop. Economies that do not add new kinds of goods and services, but continue only to repeat old work, do not expand much nor do they, by definition, develop.”
-
“Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn't necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth. Indeed, the failure of national governments and blocs of nations to force economic life to do their bidding suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.”
-
“... the principal sources of human misery may fairly be said to lie in the over-possession, under-possession, and the unwise use of economic goods.”
-
“In a society in which money determines value, women are a group who work outside the money economy.”
-
“When we liberate the economic potential of women, we elevate the economic performance of communities, nations, and the world. There is a stimulative and ripple effect that kicks in when women have greater access to jobs and the economic lives of our countries: greater political stability. Fewer military conflicts. More food. More educational opportunity for children. By harnessing the economic potential of all women, we boost opportunity for all people.”
-
“If you were starting from scratch to invent an instrument that could impose fiscal discipline, the last one on earth you would come up with is the United States government.”
-
“If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible.”
-
“... capital is the result of saving, and not of spending. The spendthrift who wastes his substance in riotous living decreases the capital of the country, and therefore the excuse often made for extravagance, that it is good for trade, is based upon false notions respecting capital.”
-
“A demand for commodities is not a demand for labor. The demand for labor is determined by the amount of capital directly devoted to the remuneration of labor: the demand for commodities simply determines in what direction labor shall be employed.”
-
“Economics is not a science, in the sense that a policy can be repeatedly applied under similar conditions and will repeatedly produce similar results.”
-
“Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy. ... Number one, that it works. Number two, that it's moral. Not always, and not everybody in it is moral, but the system is, I think, a moral one.”
-
“Contrary to economists' beliefs, the informal sectors of the world's economies, in total, are predominant, and the institutionalized, monetized sectors grow out of them and rest upon them, rather than the reverse.”
-
“... I suspected economics was irredeemable as a policy tool for citizens groups. I saw economics lead its practitioners and citizens alike into a form of brain-damaging indoctrination.”
-
“Inflation takes from the ignorant and gives to the well informed.”
-
“As the feminist saying goes, 'Women deliver.' In other words, when women control resources, the social gain is greater than when men control resources.”
-
“An industrial system predicated on the delusion of limitless expansion will, in time, consume its own basis of support.”