159 Quotes by Paul Samuelson

The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas.

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

In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history.

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.

Investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting.

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

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.

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.

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