Paul Samuelson

To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.

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

My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.

Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.

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.

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

There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.

I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.

The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists'; the problem is how to 'find' it.

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.

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.

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

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.

I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.

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

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

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?'

I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.

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.

This message (that attempting to beat the market is futile) can never be sold on Wall Street because it is in effect telling stock analysts to drop dead.

Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.