39 Quotes by George Stigler

...the number of saintly men has not yet risen to the level where the census makes them a separate statistical category.

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.

Friedman stumbled in, late to the seminar as usual and reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey. He hadn't read the paper being presented, and halfway through he just gets up, walks up to the podium, socks the mother****er right in the face and takes a piss all over his lecture notes.

I recall my mother asking in about 1946 what I was and I replied proudly that I was a professor. A decade later she repeated her question and I repeated my answer. "No promotion?" was her comment.

Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often cooly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing in the United States. He deplores the perverse effects of minimum wage laws, and the legal minimum is regularly raised each 3 or 5 years. He brands usury laws as a medieval superstition, but no state hurries to repeal its law.

Competition is a tough weed, not a delicate flower.

...it is distressing how often one can guess the answer given to an economic question merely by knowing who asks it.

There is only one social science and we are its practitioners.

The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization.