A nation is not in danger of financial disaster merely because it owes itself money.
According to the Bank of England the economy is growing too fast so interest rates must rise to counter the supposed inflationary threat. In lay terms, I interpret this to mean that people are working much harder, causing economic growth, and they're in danger of spending their money, which is what the recession-hit shops want them to do. But the Bank and the City seem to think this is wrong, and that if people work harder they should be punished by having their mortgages increased.
An economist is someone who knows more about money than the people who have it.
An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else s.
Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations? six if one went to Harvard.
Be thrifty, but not covetous.
But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ''uneconomic'' you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.
Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.
Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
Commerce is one of the daughters of Fortune, inconsistent and deceitful as her mother. she chooses her residence where she is least expected, and shifts her home when in appearance she seems firmly settled.
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.
Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.
Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.
Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in , say, physics, mathematics, or medicine — the special pleading of selfish interests.
Economy is too late when you are at the bottom of your purse.
Everyone is always in favor of general economy and particular expenditure.
Few are sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why, except for some special reason, read an inferior book, at the very time you might be reading one of the highest order?