159 Quotes by Paul Samuelson

It isn’t that greed’s increased. What’s increased is the realization that you’ve got a free field to reach out for what you’d like to do.

Reasonable men are not reasonable when you’re in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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

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.

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.