Paul Samuelson

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?'

Women are men without money.

It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle.

We've become a debtor nation. I don't mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.

I can't think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.

Let those who will - write the nation's laws - if I can write its textbooks.

Avoiding inflation is not an absolute imperative but rather is one of a number of conflicting goals that we must pursue and that we may often have to compromise.

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

In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching.

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.

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.

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

Funeral by funeral, theory advances.

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

Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.

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

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

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

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.

The Malthusian Theory - that mankind, for biological and sociological reasons, is so fertile, so fecund, that if you started out with the new continent and plenty of land for everybody, in several generations we would multiply our numbers.